


High Summer

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Post-Graduation, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22164430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “My grandfather’s old farm,” Suga had said, between the rhythmic tapping of the ball against his fingertips. “We’re selling it this summer.” Another set up into the air. It blocked out one of the gym’s ceiling lights for a split second before it sailed neatly back to his fingertips. “My mom found a buyer a few weeks ago. I'm going one last time.” The ball flew up again.The summer after graduation is sweltering, bittersweet, and full of things unspoken.
Relationships: Sawamura Daichi/Sugawara Koushi
Comments: 21
Kudos: 57





	1. Chapter 1

Daichi jolted awake from half-sleep to a car engine’s angry rumble, grabbing onto the bag that sat on his lap by pure reflex. He whipped himself around and parted the curtains that hung over the window behind him, half-kneeling, shirt plastered to his chest. His eyes had to adjust to the light for a moment as he slowly grasped, sluggish with lingering sleep and uncomfortably aware of the sweat beading on the back of his neck, that he’d dozed off on the floor with his back to the wall.

A rust-colored pickup truck, large and battered and glinting in the sun, had crept over the gravel of Daichi’s driveway, and came to a halt in front of the window. The growl of the motor swelled and choked into silence as the car was turned off. The very sight of it sent Daichi’s stomach tugging with a feeling he couldn’t put a finger on. The cooling engine began to tick, and Daichi watched the silhouette of Sugawara’s torso bob and reappear in the frame of the car’s window. Daichi smiled to himself at the bizarre sight. It exactly wasn’t the kind of car he would have pictured Sugawara driving.

It was when Sugawara leaned into the latch on the door and swung it open with a mighty squeak that Daichi came back into the present moment. Sugawara’s shoes crunched against the gravel as he hopped down from the car, which sat high enough off the ground that he had no other choice. Sugawara shielded his eyes from the sun as he smiled at something in the distance Daichi couldn’t see.

The humming box fan that Daichi had set beside himself before dozing off now called attention to itself in the silence left by the car’s engine. Daichi turned it off, and his backpack, overstuffed with clothes, clung to his shirt as he stood back up. A warm silence crept in, and Daichi took one last glance around, adjusting his backpack straps against his shoulders.

When he looked back out the window, Sugawara was gone from his spot beside the truck, the sunlight that shone off the truck’s hull blinding him through the window instead.

“Daichi!” came Sugwara’s voice, muffled by the door.

Daichi felt himself smile, and then felt his smile grow only bigger as he pulled the door open to see Sugawara standing there, head tipped back as he took a sip from an oversized plastic water bottle. It was a brand that Daichi recognised from the convenience store. He was facing half away, eyes fixed on the car he’d placed squarely in the middle of the driveway.

“It’s nice, huh?” Sugawara asked, passing the water bottle to Daichi absently, the grin across his face making it well all the way to his eyes. A bead of sweat dripped over the bridge of his nose, fallen away from a lock of hair that clung to his forehead. The sun beat down onto the pavement behind him. 

Daichi took a long sip of the water--still cold, Sugawara must have picked it up on the way--and shoved the bottle back at him. “Nice of you to let me drive it.” He snatched the keys from Sugawara’s hand, and clapped the door shut behind him.

 _“Hey!”_ And Sugawara dashed after him, the porch and driveway suddenly come to life with peals of laughter.

+++

The static-hazed broadcast of the radio was interrupted by the sound of Sugawara collapsing another emptied liter bottle of water into itself and pitching it into the back seat. The windows were down, by their agreement, because Daichi had figured out quickly that having a breeze of hot air was far better than whatever effort the air conditioning in this car could put out.

“It was my grandfather's,” Sugawara had said as they’d climbed up into the car as it still sat in Daichi’s driveway, tentatively settling themselves into the sun-baked brown leather of the seats. “An ‘86 Toyota.”

“Does it have a name?” The warm metal of Sugawara’s keyring jingled as Daichi fumbled to get it into the ignition. The steering wheel's leather was worn down heavily in the two places where someone had always put their hands on it, and the glovebox was packed with faded cd cases, the covers of which had long been bleached pale by the sun. 

Sugawara’s expression was misty as Daichi squinted through the sunlight to look over at him. “No, not that I ever knew of.”

The car smelled like warmed-up plastic, the way cars always smelled at the height of the summer. An old air freshener in the shape of a pine tree swung gently from its position on the rear-view mirror, its scent long gone. Daichi twisted the keys in the ignition, which rolled forward with a smooth mechanical click as the engine sputtered to life. He adjusted the mirror between them and slid the car back out of the driveway, aware of Sugawara’s smile pointed in his direction, caught out of the corner of his eye.

It wasn’t long into their journey, Sugawara having just thrown the second crushed water bottle into the back and cracking open a third, that Daichi’s mind wandered to the cars he had driven before. Between Sugawara’s directions-- _Left up here. Then go right after the stop sign--_ Daichi’s head spun with images of his mother’s old Mitsubishi, the car he had learned to drive in. He had also driven his dad’s van here and there, as lumbering and large as this pickup, the sheer size of which had set him on edge, then. But with Sugawara’s presence beside him and the confidence with which Sugawara himself had steered it up to Daichi’s house, nothing was left for Daichi to do but readjust his grip on the warm leather of the wheel and set his gaze steady, and spin hard on the heavy wheel when he needed to turn. _Left again right here,_ came Sugawara’s voice, as if from far away.

It wasn’t long into the journey until the two of them were sleepful and subdued with the heat, Sugawara’s eyes half-shut as he traced a finger across the map, spread wide over his side of the dashboard. Daichi flicked his eyes over before turning left, the sound of the blinker barely present to him over the hum of the radio.

Sugawara didn’t need the map, Daichi knew, having observed him take it out from where it had been stuck in the pickup’s overhead slot and spread it out carefully, fingers tracing not over the route that they were taking, but over the folds in the paper where it had been nestled into itself for years. Or _decades,_ Daichi thought.

But he was certain this was a route Sugawara knew by heart. The paper was sun-baked and thin, the frayed edge of one side suggesting that it had been torn from some large atlas years before. Sugawara regarded it carefully, almost reverently, taking it out and folding it back into itself over and over again if by compulsion, regardless whether or not he had to give a direction.

Neither of them spoke for a while. The radio was beginning to crack and hiss itself to a slow death, each cluster of trees reducing its sound to a low static as they made their way further from the center of Miyagi. The sound eventually came to a buzz that thickly blanketed the voices of the broadcast. Daichi didn’t reach to turn it down, and Sugawara seemed to be leaning hard into the comfortable silence that hung between them; whatever spell the heat and the radio had cast over them was not something that Daichi trusted himself to flick off.

The crack of the gravel beneath the truck’s tires and the spit of the radio carried well on into late morning. At some point Sugawara’s legs ended up on the dashboard, his head tipped back in half-sleep, forearm resting on the outside of the car against the sun-baked metal. Daichi’s thoughts lost themselves deep in the rolling sea of green that enveloped them, coming back to the present moment only when Sugawara passed him the half-empty water bottle wordlessly, which was still cool and damp to the touch. _1:23 PM,_ said the clock, suddenly grabbing Daichi’s attention. They’d been driving for four hours. The heat seemed to swim.

Daichi tipped the water bottle back far, keeping a single eye fixed on the road’s wavering course before them. _Turn right at the next corner,_ came Sugawara’s voice, the first direction since they’d turned onto this road an hour ago. _Then we’re there._

Daichi nodded silently and passed Sugawara the water bottle after pulling it from the smile on his lips.

+++

Sugawara hadn’t asked him about it, he had simply mentioned it offhand, and Daichi had asked before he could stop himself.

“My grandfather’s old farm,” he had said, between the rhythmic tapping of the ball against his fingertips. “We’re selling it this summer.” Another set up into the air. It blocked out one of the gym’s ceiling lights for a split second before it sailed neatly back to his fingertips. “My mom found a buyer a few weeks ago.” The ball flew up again.

The two lay sprawled out on their backs beneath the net in Karasuno’s gym, heads together, feet in opposite directions. The rest of the team had disappeared into the dark blanket of the evening to get snacks from the convenience store, cheered on by Tanaka’s distant calls. Daichi lay with one hand resting on his forehead, squinting into the gym’s lights.

“We’re going to see if there’s anything left to harvest and then finally clear out the farmhouse. It’ll take me a few days. My mom told me the next person moving in wants to replant the old peach orchard with tea.”

Daichi had been there once, as a first year. A weekend of training with Asahi and Sugawara, just as they were beginning to become friends. His memories of it were vague; a sun soaked hill with rising terraces of neatly pruned trees, Sugawara’s grandfather offering them homemade rice balls, the well-trodden clearing where Sugawara’s older sisters had erected a volleyball net years before, that now leaned into the slope of the earth with its age. The three of them practicing over and over again at the crooked net until their legs were bruised and smeared with dirt. Receive. Set. Spike.

The ball flew back up into the air again. This time, Daichi watched Sugawara’s fingers instead of the ball, as they retreated gently into their triangular position in anticipation of the ball’s return, and then sprang back up in the blink of an eye, launching it skyward again. And again.

“I remember,” Daichi murmured. “That place was really nice.”

“Yeah.” Daichi heard the smile in Sugawara’s voice. “It still is.”

 _It still is._ Daichi chanced a glance over him, and saw the wistfulness that was written on his face. The ball cast a shadow over his smile for another brief moment before it was gone again. “I spent nearly every summer there as kid. My family would go in late July, when its the hottest. He would let me and my sisters climb into the back of the truck and he’d drive between the rows, letting us pick the ripe fruits right off the trees.” Sugawara paused for a moment, letting the ball tap his hands twice before speaking again. “It was the first place I ever played volleyball, actually. I think it’ll be nice to go back one last time.”

Sugawara’s grandfather had passed away in the summer between their second and third year. Daichi had gotten the news from one of Sugawara’s sisters. Although he hadn’t seen Sugawara for weeks around the time that it had happened, the certain uncharacteristic reserve that Sugawara had returned to school with in their third year, and had taken a while to shake off, told Daichi what he needed to know. He had taken Sugawara aside, on the first day they had seen each other again, and told him he was sorry for his loss. The interaction was stiff and formal, and Sugawara had slipped away again out of the back room quickly, but only after giving Daichi a long, wordless hug. Daichi was pretty sure he was the only one on the team who had known. It had only taken a few days of practice with the first years before Daichi felt Sugawara really returned, and Daichi had felt almost guilty at his relief. They hadn’t talked about it since. That someone was going to have to close up the farm hadn’t occurred to Daichi until now.

“Are you going with your sisters?” Daichi asked. The question simply slipped out.

Another tap of the ball against Sugawara’s outstretched fingertips. “No, Himari’s at university until the fall and Ichika doesn’t want to go.” Daichi looked over to find Sugawara’s expression unreadable. The ball came back down, and Sugawara paused with it in his hands for a moment before sending it back up. “I get it.”

“Mm.” Daichi looked away again, no longer shielding his eyes from the gym’s lights, instead letting them blur and scatter across his vision like fuzzy white strings. In the distance, he could hear the shouting voices of Tanaka and the rest of the team as they returned. “If you’re going alone, can I come with you?”

The ball stilled again, perched between Sugawara’s fingertips like stilts. Daichi suddenly felt heavy against the gym floor, aware of his every point of contact with it. He heard the rusling noise of Sugawara turning towards him before he saw him. As Daichi looked, his eyes were caught by the maroon lanyard from Waseda University that hung out of Sugawara’s pocket, half-spilled onto the floor. Daichi had one too, his the kelly green of Hokkaido University, tucked away in his volleyball bag. He looked then to Sugawara, whose eyes were gleaming.

“Of course you can.”

Something in Daichi’s chest clenched, to the raucous sound of Tanaka throwing open the gym’s doors and inviting a gust of air in with them, bright and full with the sound of Hinata and Kageyama’s voices. Daichi looked up at them and their paper bags of pork buns for what he knew might be the last time, now propped up on one elbow, squinting through the gym lights. The team only had one night of practice left before their last tournament. 

Before he knew it, Sugawara was on his feet standing next to him, offering him a hand up, whatever shimmering and clear moment of silence that had passed between them suddenly whisked away, all too soon. “Come on!”

Daichi smiled as he took his hand.

+++ 

The both of them seemed to rise from their state of heat-induced half-sleep as soon as they rounded the corner into farm’s driveway. Daichi had recognised the road the moment he set his eyes on the rising terraces of peach trees, jutting out bravely above the forest’s horizon line. They were no longer as full and well-pruned as they once were, and the uncombed fields around them swayed high and yellow with wild grass, but his memory of the farm’s range was still clear.

The car jostled and climbed past the last cluster of trees out into the open sunlight, bringing Sugawara to shield his eyes and finally click off the crackling radio as he leaned forward in his seat to get a better look at the farmhouse. Daichi recognised the look of wonder on his face even in his peripheral vision.

“It’s just how I remember it,” Sugawara murmured.

“I remember it too, a bit,” Daichi said, struck with the image of him and Sugawara and Asahi piling out of this same car two years ago, and scrambling up the terraced hill to the volleyball net tucked away in the shade at the back end of the orchard. The farmhouse itself looked the same, too, small and serene and painted a chipping shade of white, proudly boasting a sun-baked and overgrown garden that had swarmed around the front door in the years gone by. 

The terraces that rose up the hills behind the house were steep and sizable, and dwarfed the rest of the property in their soaring rows of trees in various stages of overgrowth or death. It was clear to see that no one had lived here for more than a year, but the property was still swimming with sunlight and summer heat, and it was not at all difficult to imagine how beautiful the farm had been in its years of vitality--as if the ghost of the love once poured into it was still roaming the property, to be caught doing its work in small things, like the tacky garden ornaments and a rope swing that swayed gently from the branch of a distant tree.

“It’s been so long,” Sugawara’s voice was swallowed by the breeze. Daichi looked over to find him leaning halfway out of the car window, forearms braced against the door, t-shirt fluttering against his skin, a grin betrayed by the upturned corner of his mouth. Something shifted around in his insides as Sugawara leaned furtner out of the window to brush his fingers over the tips of a particularly overgrown patch of grass in passing. “Who would have guessed?”

Daichi couldn’t fight back a smile. “Who would have guessed what?”

Sugawara contorted himself back into the car to look at Daichi, mirroring his smile. “I dunno, I just— Wait.”

Daichi was leaning into the wheel to bring the car into the small parking spot nestled against the side of the farmhouse, but he stepped on the brake. “Hm?”

“Don’t park yet.” Sugawara gestured with a finger down an overgrown driveway that led deeper into the property. “Go over there.”

Daichi obliged with a wordless grin, shifting the truck back into gear.

The path Sugawara had set them on disappeared into the trees for only a moment before reemerging at the level of the lowest peach terrace, and it dawned on Daichi that this was the access road for farm equipment.

“Go up another level or two,” Sugawara murmured, still leaning far out of the window to get a close look at the trees. Daichi could see fruit hanging between tight bundles of leaves, and was then struck with the smell of the orchard. The weekend that they’d been here with Asahi as first-years had been spent training in the back, not among the trees; he had no recollection of this smell. The air tasted sweet and warm and heavy, almost as if the already oppressive heat was magnified by the scent of the fruit. He breathed in deeply.

They re-emerged again between two higher terraces. The car was now passing between two rows of healthier trees, sending leafy shadows bending over the dashboard. Daichi slammed on the brake the moment he saw Sugawara swinging the passenger-side door open. “Suga? What the hell are you doing?”

“Keep driving, it’s fine!” Sugawara’s voice was barely to be heard; he had already thrown a leg into the back bed of the truck and in a mere matter of seconds had pulled himself expertly along the outside of the moving truck into it, with the speed and assuredness of someone who had done it dozens of times before. The passenger side door snapped shut and Daichi was left shocked and without any time to react, craning his neck around only to catch a glimpse of Sugawara’s torso through the dirt-spattered back window.

“What are you doing?”

“Pull up closer on the right side!”

And then it dawned on Daichi was Sugawara was doing, and his look of surprise transformed into a grin. He tugged on the wheel and the truck crawled to the left until leaves began slapping against the open window frame, at which he righted the vehicle again, still creeping along at a snail’s pace. He heard Sugawara’s laughter from the back.

“What, did you—” Daichi’s voice cut off as Sugawara suddenly leaned forward from the back bed of the truck, and passed him a peach through the driver-side window, hand seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Daichi couldn’t suppress his laughter as he took the fruit, which was massive and soft and sun-warm. The car rolled on as Sugawara’s hand disappeared, steered with one hand, and Daichi bit into it. 

“And?” came Sugawara’s voice only moments later, from the passenger side. Daichi heard the soft bump of Sugawara’s hands against the truck’s hull. From the outside, he’d tugged on the door’s latch to swing it back open, and it now swept against the branches of the trees. Daichi pulled the car back to the center of the road; Sugawara left the door frame empty for a brief moment before swinging himself back into the car one leg at at time, hanging from the outside of the frame until he could settle his weight back into the nest of the seat.

Daichi was helpless but to watch, peach juice dripping down his chin, eyes flickering nervously between the road and Sugawara, until the passenger side door clicked shut again. Sugawara grinned in gleeful awareness of what he’d just done. A basket had been made out of the front of his t-shirt, in which three more peaches sat. He took a large bite out of one, and asked, mouth full and eyes gleaming with mock innocence: “Want another one?”

Daichi burst into belly-cramping laughter again, heady with delight and disbelief, and the car swerved for a moment. “Yes.”


	2. Chapter 2

“We cleared out most of the furniture last fall,” Sugawara had announced, the moment they entered the farmhouse. “So it’s a bit empty.”

Daichi had shuffled inside with a smile on his face, shoes kicked off, arms full with his and Sugawara’s overstuffed bags. He’d set them down on the floor, beside where he now sat. Suga had disappeared immediately into the other rooms to turn on the lights and open all of the sliding doors, and Daichi could hear his distant footsteps against the tatami mats as he padded through the house. The heat of midday was already oppressive, but the air inside as they’d come in was baked through and stifling. The lazy draft that now drifted through the wide-open doors, inviting the sun in with it, was hot but welcome.

Nearly all the furniture had been taken away already, save for a low table in the middle of the living room and a pile of futons in the corner, illuminated white in a pool of sun. Daichi had spread himself and his belongings out on the floor against the wall, and now sat idly with his eyes wandering about the room. A small kitchen, empty and paneled in white, was attached to the living space, Sugawara’s package of liter-size water bottles and two remaining peaches the only things sitting on the counter.

Daichi heard him returning from the hall, and looked over Suga shuffling into the room with an oversized cardboard box in his arms.

“Turns out there were a few boxes we forgot to bring with us during the big move,” Suga said through gritted teeth, leaning back to counterbalance the weight. He wore a fond smile. “There’s still a few more in the bedroom.”

Daichi returned with him to the bedroom to fetch the rest of the boxes, which were sealed shut, but labeled in hastily scrawled red sharpie, with words like  _ KITCHEN _ and  _ SPRING 2010 _ . The bedroom was completely barren, a small square room with a single sliding door that Suga had left open, devoid of furniture. The only signs of former life were the permanent shadows stamped onto the walls where furniture had once stood, blocking the drywall from the bleaching light of the sun. Daichi could make out the shape of bed’s headboard and a dresser against the far wall, where only sunlight and pollen now floated in. 

Hoisting one of the boxes off of the floor, he couldn’t help but imagine Sugawara’s family gathering here to pack up his grandfather’s belongings in the wake of his passing, lining them up and sealing them away. He glanced sheepishly at Sugawara’s face, searching despite himself for any flicker of emotion, and finding none.

“We should bring them out by front door. We’ll need to pack them into the truck before we leave.”

_ Right, _ Daichi thought. He didn’t know how many days they would be spending here. He followed Suga silently and they left the boxes by the door.

They returned to the bedroom for a second time for the rest of the boxes only to find that there was one remaining, which Sugawara insisted on taking. Daichi let him, searching the expression on his face again before he disappeared. “No, I got it.”

Daichi, unsure of what else to do, stayed in the bedroom, settling himself on the floor where the sliding doors had been left open. They opened up into the overgrown and expansive garden in the back, which he could only squint into. It, too, was quite clearly the ghost of something once beautiful and well-maintained. Beneath the overgrown tangle of plants stood an orderly grid of square garden plots, and a trail of red gravel that wandered between them, scattered here and there with dirt where the side-wall of a plot had tipped over and emptied its guts out. Small, broad red maples lined the border where the garden met the house, the sight of which swam in the sun. Daichi was suddenly aware of the sweat beading on his skin, and reached up to swipe at the back of his neck before setting his hands on the mat behind him. 

Sugawara’s quiet footsteps reappeared, and Daichi heard him pause in the doorway. Diachi looked over his shoulder to discover him smiling out into the garden, gaze fixed over his head.

“Used to be a bit nicer,” Sugawara said as he took a seat on the floor next to Daichi, legs bent in front of him.

“It’s still nice,” Daichi said, matching his small smile. 

Sugawara leaned forward with his arms slung over his knees, offering a small laugh into the sunlight. “I wish you had seen it when he was still here. It was gorgeous”

Daichi let that thought sit before responding, letting the image of the overgrown and unkempt green tangle of plants blur in his vision. “I think I did, actually.” He could recall faint images of the garden at night, glimpsed from the living room through the open doors when he and Sugawara and Asahi had settled down to sleep--thin stalks of young lychee trees woven through towers of chicken wire, the broad and low-lying leaves of melon plants, gray and vague in the moonlight.

“But I mean that I wish you had really  _ seen _ it.” Sugawara shuffled himself through the doorway, down the few steps in front of them so he could touch the leaf of an overgrown plant, baked yellow in the sun. “And tasted the fruit,” he looked over at Daichi, smiling. “It was amazing.”

Daichi shrugged, smiling back. “It still is. The peaches.”

“He had the best lychee, though. And strawberries. And watermelons, too, when he could get it to work. Some seasons he would have twenty, some he would only have five. But they were always good.” Sugwara’s gaze was fixed on the shriveled leaf in his palm. “My sisters would make them into juice, if they were particularly sweet. At least when our grandfather would let them do it. There was one time we snuck into the back rows of the garden late at night and tried to pick one out before they were ripe.” He laughed again. “I remember learning my lesson that night. Unripe watermelon isn’t very sweet.”

Daichi was struck with the image of a small, wide-eyed Sugawara biting into a green slice of watermelon and pulling a face. A smile tugged at his lips. He studied Sugawara’s focus, now, the way he ran his thumb over the plant’s dying leaf, the way he reached up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind his ear, unaware of how it slipped right back down.

“I spent a lot of time in the garden, actually. But I didn’t help with weeding as much as I probably should have. We would always lay down beside the koi pool in the mornings before it got really hot, and try to get the fish to play with us instead of helping out,” Sugawara murmured. His smile couldn’t be missed. “We would stay when it got hot, too.”

“There’s a koi pool?”

“There was,” he looked up at Daichi briefly. “My grandfather filled it in eventually, when it was clear to him that he wouldn’t be able to take good care of the fish anymore. He sold the fish and planted a persimmon tree over the ground where the pool once was.”

Daichi looked out at what he could see of the garden, clueless as to where it once was in the current tangle of overgrowth. “Do you think there’s any harvestable fruit left, here?”

Sugawara followed Daichi’s gaze out across the plots. “Probably, actually. That’s part of what I need to do while we’re here. Harvest what’s salvageable and bring it home one last time. There’s a row of tea plants in the way back, and aside from those I’m going to have to tear everything out.”

Daichi frowned in surprise. “Does the buyer not want to keep the garden?”

Sugawara shook his head, eyes still fixed in the distance. “He wants to replant everything with tea.”

Daichi’s brows knitted together. He was suddenly aware of the muggy heat of the sun against his legs, the way Sugawara’s gaze was still turned in the direction directly opposite him. “And it’s your job to overturn the garden?”

Suga met his eyes with an unexpected smile. “I offered to do it.” He stood up suddenly, trailing a hand over the tops of the plant’s leaves as he took a few steps further into the garden, and then leaned into the overgrowth. He re-emerged moments later with a bundle of ripe red lychee in his hand and a grin on his face. He plucked one off and passed it to Daichi, hand lingering for a moment before he spoke. “I wanted to say goodbye one last time.”

Daichi’s eye was suddenly caught again on the Waseda University lanyard that hung out of the pocket of Sugawara’s shorts, as red as the fruit that sat in his palm. An image came with it, of the two of them idling late into the evening on the floor of Karasuno’s gym, Sugawara setting the ball up above their heads as the same red lanyard almost slipped out of his pocket and onto the floor.

Something deep and acute bloomed in his chest. He squinted into the sun to meet Sugawara’s eyes, and he felt his words nearly catch on his lips as he spoke. “I can understand that.”

+++

The first thing Daichi concerned himself with was the volleyball net. Sugawara had settled himself onto the kitchen floor that afternoon after unpacking his things, and scrawled down a list of all that needed to get done while they were here.

“Crate peaches, plywood in the back by the swing, harvest and overturn garden, weed tea plants, mow walkway, load moving boxes.” He’d tapped his pen against the counter arhythmically, lost in thought. “Anything I’m missing?”

Daichi, who had just appeared in the doorway after taking a look at the volleyball net, had asked, short of breath: “Is it alright if I go fix the old net?”

Sugawara had laughed and nodded.

The pickup truck sat shaded and serene in the packed-down dirt of the driveway as Daichi now hauled the bucket of tools that Sugawara had pointed him towards into the clearing around the net. He set it down beside the fallen pole and took in the sight of the neglected thing, hands on his hips, squinting into the sunlight.

When they had come here as first-years, the net was still usable, but pulling away from itself at the posts, the cables of the net thin and fraying in the middle. Daichi could recall the image of Sugawara’s grandfather, leaning against the wooden siding of the toolshed, chuckling to himself fondly when Daichi and Asahi came to him asking about the net.

“This old net has seen a whole lot of action, now.” He’d rummaged around in the back of the shed, sawdust clouding the air, passing a skinnier, doe-eyed Daichi whatever necessary tools and materials he could find. “I figure it’s about time someone got around to repairing it.”

And so the two of them had set about anchoring the net’s poles deeper into the loamy dirt, while Sugawara and Asahi looked on in careful curiosity. In the end they’d settled on creating wooden braces around the outside of the poles that took away some of the tension while keeping them anchored in the ground. The cord of the net itself was patched with duct tape where it had been fraying in the middle. Asahi had slammed hundreds of jump serves into it over the course of that weekend and it had held up, to their collective glee.

Those temporary wooden braces had now snapped on one side, and the net hung limp, with one pole fallen inwards horizontally and the other threatening to tip over and join it. The sight of it was saddening, as if haunted by the image of their younger selves, who had once played around it so carelessly. Daichi felt himself growing more restless the longer he stood there staring at, unable to put together exactly how it could be fixed.

Moments later he was digging his feet into the loose dirt of the court and hoisting the fallen pole onto his shoulder, fingers wrapped tightly around the sun-warmed and cracking wood.  _ Like squatting for a low receive.  _

His feet nearly slid out from under him before he caught himself with a grunt, pole only halfway vertical. It took a few uncertain seconds with the fraying net brushing against his face until Daichi finally heaved the pole’s weight onto itself, settling it into the position it had stood in years prior. The net sprang against this, wanting to pull the pole back down to earth, but Daichi braced his back against it after whipping around to take in the other side, chest rising and falling with the effort. He stood there in thought.

Twenty minutes later, a rope tied around the top of the readjusted pole, staked into the ground like a camping tent, did the trick. Daichi re-hammered the year-old supports at the base of the opposite pole back into place and then stepped off of the dusty court to take in his work. The poles were still slightly crooked, like last time, but when he stood in the middle of the net and leaned hard into it, it gave no protest aside from the whining of the age-dried wood. Daichi felt a smile spread across his face.

Moments later, he was pulling a dusty roll of duct tape from the bottom of the tool crate Suga had lent him and re-bandaging the damaged cords, which had only gotten more frayed and sun-baked in the years gone by. Some of the most damaged sections were more gray than white, plastered in layers of tape where the net had been battered by a few too many missed serves or sideward spikes.

It was when Daichi was almost done patching the net, a strip of duct tape pinched between his teeth, t-shirt pasted against his back with sweat, that he heard Sugawara’s voice from behind him.

“Are you ever planning on coming back down?” His call was lilting and bright, and Daichi whipped around to find that he hadn’t appeared from behind the tool shed yet. 

“Suga, come take a look!” Daichi called, plucking the duct tape out of his mouth and ducking below the net to wait for Sugawara to round the corner, feet brushing against the overgrown grass where the edge of the court met the lawn.

The look on his face was priceless from the moment he appeared. Sugawara had a cart of wood scraps in tow, of which Daichi only got a fleeting glance. Sugawara dropped the handle of it behind him to shield his eyes from the sun as he squinted, lips parted in surprise. His brows knitted together for a moment before a grin, blindingly bright, spread across his face.

_ “Daichi,” _ was the first thing he said. 

“Yes?” Daichi smiled. He was suddenly aware of the sweat beading on his skin, causing the soft hair at the nape of his neck to curl with the moisture, and plastering the cotton of his thin t-shirt to his chest.

“How long did that take you, exactly?”

Daichi threw a glance over his shoulder at the net. “Half an hour?”

Sugawara dropped his hand, placing it on his hip, and to Daichi’s relief, his smile grew only wider. “To be completely honest with you, I had no idea what you were planning on doing.” There was a delighted laughter in his voice, and a quiet pause before he spoke again. “I’m impressed.”

Daichi made his way across the sun-bleached lawn to join Sugawara and look at his work from afar, a matching smile appearing on his lips. The sun had begun its afternoon descent behind the trees, which swayed a steady and gentle pattern of shadow over the court. Specks of pollen, floating high and gentle, hung in the air around it. Pride swelled in Daichi’s chest. It hadn’t looked this good even two years ago on that weekend they’d first repaired it. “What else was I going to be doing with your grandfather’s box of tools at the old net?”

Sugawara shook his head helplessly, smiling gaze still fixed on the sight of it. “I have no clue.” Daichi heard him exhale long, and then laugh. “To be honest with you, Daichi. . .” He blinked though the blinding sun, and then met Daichi’s gaze for a brief and vulnerable moment, the silence suddenly growing heavy.

“What?”

Suga shook his head and smiled again. His voice was quiet. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be able to fix it.”

Daichi looked away, finding himself unable to meet Sugawara’s eyes. He waited another moment, gaze hazy with the brightness of the afternoon, before responding in an equally hushed tone. His stomach was doing swoops. He barely trusted himself to get the words out. “Of course I was going to fix it.”

A cautious glance over to Sugawara found him fiddling with the hem of his shirt. Silence swept in again, until Daichi became aware of the sound of afternoon cicadas that hung around them, and the whistling of the breeze that parted the low blades of grass. The wind graced them for a moment, sending the fabric of Sugawara’s shirt flapping gently against his chest, and chilling the sweat that had beaded across Daichi’s shoulders.

Eventually, as the two stood there admiring the net, the silence took on the same quality it had had in the car; radio-static silence that did not hang between them but rather settled gently, as a truth, around them, tinged with mutual awareness but unharmed by it. The same silence as three weeks ago when they’d walked the long way home together through the streets of Miyagi the night after their last practice at Karasuno’s gym, conscious of the finality of the situation and full of silent reverence for it, or when Sugawara passed him a water bottle without being prompted and no  _ please _ s or  _ thank you _ s were necessary, because they just knew. 

“Thank you,” Sugawara said eventually, long after the hush of the overgrown grass and the buzz of the insects had faded into a warm, sweet kind of white noise.

Daichi looked at him, and matched his smile involuntarily, shielding his eyes against the light reflected off of the hull of the toolshed behind him. Something hit him then, the blurry memory of something he’d glimpsed inside, two years earlier. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said, and disappeared quickly behind Sugawara, tugging open the tool shed’s door with a squeak. He reappeared seconds later, ducking beneath the low doorframe, brushing layers of dust and dirt off of a volleyball, old and worn, found laying on the floor in the corner. The shed’s door clapped shut behind him.

“You just have to play with me,” he said.

The two took off running towards the net to the sound of Sugawara’s laughter.


	3. Chapter 3

They had just made it inside, racing against the verge of sundown, when the rain started pouring down in sheets. Heavy, warm blankets of water pounded against the earth of the garden, sending shivers up Daichi’s bare legs as he stood in the living room staring out into the storm, left open to him by the sliding doors that they couldn’t get shut. Moisture had begun to collect on the floor mats closest to the doors, where the warm droplets of rain that escaped the patio’s roof splattered up from the stairs.

“We’ll leave it, it’s okay,” Suga had said minutes before, watching Daichi struggle against the jammed lock that would have let them slide the doors shut, shoulders still sore from the rounds of receives they’d practiced all afternoon.

Suga had then disappeared into another room, leaving Daichi and his dirt-splattered shorts to stand and stare as the first bolts of lightning danced their way across the horizon. The ghostly image of the overgrown garden, which Sugawara said they’d be razing the next day, flashed silver in the darkness as it whipped against the hot sheets of rain. The single porchlight outside was the only other source of illumination, and it left bands of brightness hanging in the air beside the patio’s roof, where Daichi’s gaze lingered.

Daichi was scared of thunderstorms. It was the lingering unease born from a childhood memory of getting caught outside in a violent storm--the last bus after volleyball practice missed, his mother not picking up the phone, the cavernous expanse of sky seeming to crack open at the seams with each snap of lightning across the horizon. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten.

The inward, private embarrassment of harboring such a fear had become worse than the fear itself in recent years. He could recall the late nights at training camp during his second year in which it had begun to rain just as they’d gotten out, and he’d laid awake between Sugawara and Asahi, eyes fixed on the ceiling, waiting for the rumble of thunder through the rain that never came, a crooked smile on his lips at the sheer fact that he was still scared of such a thing. It seemed backwards to him, incongruent, unfitting with the way that the way the team saw him and the way he behaved around them; the exact kind of thing that Sugawara always seemed to be able to see through. _Just a rain storm._

But this was more than just a rain storm, and he felt the same rueful smile spread across his face in perfect unison with the first real shudder of thunder than ran through the floor. It wasn’t like earlier, when he was a kid, and he’d spend the night beneath his blanket in the corner of his bed, and the last handful of times his bedroom had been illuminated by crashes of lightning in the night he’d even laughed at his own reaction, but something about having to deal with it in Sugawara’s presence re-tightened the once-loosening knot in his gut.

Sugawara wasn’t aware of this fear, he was almost entirely certain; he also knew the only thing to be done was to take in long breaths of the humid night air and stay put until sleep acted its mercy on him. His muscles were warm and aching with the fresh memory of the afternoon spent slamming a volleyball back and forth, and he knew he should pull out the futons and sit down, but something kept him rooted to the spot.

“I found the clean sheets,” called Sugawara’s voice, still quiet enough that Daichi knew he was halfway down the hall. Daichi whipped around, bare feet unsticking from the floor. The rueful smile dropped from his lips.

“Is everything alright?” Suga appeared in the doorway, head barely visible over a stack of folded comforters that sat in his arms. 

“Yeah.” Daichi said, turning back around to face the storm. He searched for something to say. “We made it inside just in time, apparently.”

“I thought it was going to storm. I had a feeling, even before we started playing.” Daichi was aware of the soft sound of Sugawara laying the sheets down on the floor, followed by his footsteps making their way across the room. Another flash of lightning curled across the sky. “It would always rain like this, at least once every time that we visited.”

Daichi looked over his shoulder again, and found Sugawara beginning to unfold the large stack of futons that lay in the corner, humming as he went.

“My grandfather always told me there’s a way to tell when it’s about to storm. Something about the soil or the smell of the air, I can’t quite remember.” Daichi wasn’t looking anymore, but there was a smile in Sugawara’s voice.

“It’s when you feel the pressure drop. And everything gets really still. It feels like the air has been sucked away,” Daichi said. His eyes lingered on the wood panels of the back patio where they met the edge of the tatami mats, glistening white and wet with moisture. He flexed his feet against the floor, uncomfortably aware of his own heartbeat. Another band of lightning wove itself across the dark and distant sky, followed moments later by the growl of thunder. He stood stock still, light burring across his vision. Another dense sheet of rain crashed down. “There’s a smell, too. The air smells clean, or something.” 

Sugawara was silent for several seconds, and Daichi looked over his shoulder at him. He was bent over, halfway to bringing a futon into the center of the floor, looking back at Daichi with an unreadable expression. Another moment of silence crept in.

“Come here,” Sugawara said suddenly, standing up and gesturing with his free hand.

“What?” 

Sugawara beckoned him over again, picking the futon back up off the floor. “Come help me put the futons together.”

Daichi, somehow awakened from his frozen state, found himself beside Sugawara in the next instant, pushing the two mattresses across the floor. Suga grabbed the sheets and they laid them out wordlessly, Daichi unwilling to question Sugawara’s insistence. He was still painfully conscious of the storm’s violent pulse, and found himself staring blankly at the floor for another moment before regaining the presence of mind to grab the pillows that lay in the corner. 

Sugawara was in the kitchen, next thing he knew, pulling open cabinets seemingly at random until he seemed to find what he was looking for. Daichi stood uselessly in the middle of the room, attention still fixed on the lashes of light behind him, but no longer letting himself look. Suga yanked open more drawers and shuffled around in their contents before yanking something out and clicking it into an object Daichi couldn’t see.

“One second,” Sugawara murmured. Daichi then heard a soft cracking and spitting noise, and watched carefully as Sugawara set a box down on the counter and began spinning a dial on the side.

“A radio?” Daichi asked reflexively.

Sugawara smiled, brows still knitted together in concentration. “Yes,” he said, sliding another dial to the right. The radio’s steady hum grew louder and less garbled, and soon enough Sugawara lifted it off the counter and brought it over to the futons.

The radio’s casing was brassy metal, smudged and discolored with age, a cracked glass gauge centered on its face. It was large and perhaps decades old, and Daichi was certain that he wouldn’t have known how to use it, but Suga had set himself down on their mattresses and was slowly but surely coaxing coherent noise from it, the smile on his lips growing only wider as voices became audible.

Another band of lightning struck itself high and clear, and Daichi regretted flinching instantly.

Suga looked up at him again, expression impossible to read, and waited a silent moment before patting the spot on the futon next to him. “Sit down.”

Daichi did as he was told, feeling oddly seen. He winced when the soreness in his muscles made itself known. His head was still unclear and his vision was fixed stubbornly on the point where the floor met the wall, but Suga continued fiddling with the radio dials until a clear channel came through, and he leaned himself back to listen. Daichi sat wordlessly.

The voice that rumbled and cracked through the radio was still muffled, but when Daichi leaned forward and blocked out the constant roar of the rain against the roof, he could hear what was being said. “ _\--until approximately five A.M. tomorrow morning. It is recommended that — remain inside — all possible — have been reported at —”_

“The weather report?” Daichi asked, as the radio hissed itself dead once more.

Suga laughed and nodded, gently tapping the dial to the right until the broadcast came through clearly again. “Wait a moment.” He adjusted the volume before heaving the radio off of his lap and setting it on the ground by their feet, so that the broadcast--now clearer than before--filled the room with sound. Another rumble of thunder rolled through the floor, but Daichi barely noticed, watching Suga let himself fall backwards onto the futon, sprawled out. Daichi mirrored his smile despite himself.

“Lay down,” Sugawara said.

Daichi lay down beside him, feeling as if he’d somehow been caught, and the cool sheet that they’d spread over the futon billowed and then settled with his weight.

Neither of them spoke, but the room’s humid air was swimming with noise; the radio broadcast dipped in and out of clarity in rhythm with the pounding of the rain. Claps of thunder came ever nearer and lounder, sending the overgrown lychee stalks outside tapping against the siding of the house, drowning out the radio’s hiss. Daichi exhaled long.

The feeling that had gripped him earlier, as he’d stared out into the storm and found himself unable to move, seemed to loosen its grip ever slowly. First, with the rippling of the bedsheet against his arm, waving with the breeze that wafted in from the patio; then, with the gradual awareness of Suga’s steady breathing beside him. Another flash of lightning came, flickering through the room in blinding brilliance as quickly as it vanished, and the radio broadcast was momentarily reduced to pure static before it hummed back to life.

Daichi risked a glance to his left and discovered Sugawara with his eyes shut, chest rising and falling, hands laying loosely over his stomach in a picture of perfect serenity. 

“ _—anywhere between eight and ten cenimeters—reports of—in from the southern —return in ten minutes—update —”_

The broadcast changed, then, as Daichi was squinting through the dark to study the loose strands of hair that had fallen across Sugawara’s forehead, and with another growl of thunder, Sugawara was suddenly smiling.

Music had begun to play, instead of the weather forecast. It was unclear what it was, at first, but after a few long moments of staring into the dim and listening, Daichi recognised that the familiar swell of old jazz was what crackled and hissed through the air. It, too, was at the mercy of the whipping rain outside, but its melody carried along stubbornly.

“Did you really think I was going to make us listen to the weather report?” Sugawara asked, after they’d listened for a few seconds.

Daichi laughed, then, when he looked across the futon again and was met with Sugawara’s knowing smile. “I guess not.”

The feeling of being frozen, he realized, had now dissolved completely, replaced by a warmth that tugged low in his gut. Daichi’s hand idled against the material of his t-shirt, which tightened and loosened against his chest in rhythm with his breathing.

Yet another flash of lightning came, but the music kept playing, and he didn’t flinch.

“Why did you . . .” Daichi was suddenly speaking before he could stop himself, but his words failed him. _How did you know?_

Another moment before Sugawara spoke. “The radio?” He was grinning.

Daichi looked over at him again, equally aware of the darkness in the room and the fact that he had never felt so seen. He felt ridiculous. “Well, yeah,” he heard his own voice say.

“It’s what my grandfather would do whenever it stormed like this. He would sit with me and we would play with the radio until we found the station that was the clearest.” Sugawara’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “And we’d listen to the music or the weather broadcast until the storm passed. Or until I felt better. It’s not exactly magic, but it helps to have something else to focus on. It makes the storm feel more quiet.” Sugawara exhaled slowly. “And it reminds you that the rest of the world is still out there.” 

Daichi was hyperaware, then, of Sugawara sliding his hands up to settle them behind his head. The near-silent flutter of cotton against bare skin rose and fell. Daichi kept his eyes on the ceiling.

“I was always scared of thunderstorms, too,” Sugawara muttered, after the rhythmic purr of the rain had swept back in to fill the silence.

Daichi’s gut tugged, for a brief and excruciating moment.

“I’m not scared,” he said, and knew how false the words rang the moment they left his lips.

He then lay there in wordless limbo, their mutual unspoken awareness of his denial hanging as high and marked above his head as the next bolt of lightning that shot across the horizon. His eyes didn’t waver from the ceiling, until another soft sound from the futon beside him sent his fingers curling into the fabric of his t-shirt.

Sugawara was halfway sitting up, when Daichi looked at him, haloed dimly in the bent light of the porch lamp that stood outside. 

“It’s okay to be scared.”

The growl of thunder, promised by the silent dart of lightning moments before, sent shivers through the floor of the house. Only silence sat in its wake.

Daichi wondered if Suga remembered, too.

  
  


_“Don’t mind!”_ Daichi had called. “You’ll get the next one!” 

His voice had rang loud and confident across the court, passing under the gym’s lights with the same certainty that had sent Oikawa’s third serve spinning off of Tsukishima’s forearms moments before; Daichi, however, could barely hear his own voice, overwhelmed by the sense that the sounds of the game were now being pitched at him through a dark and narrow tunnel. Seijou stood well in the lead, 20 - 15. That had been their third point in a row. 

He had resettled himself back into position at the distant tone of the whistle, head swimming with the sight of the net before him, eyes drifting unfocused between Kageyama’s dark head of hair and the shape of Oikawa’s figure at the end of the court, launching the ball skyward for the fourth time; nothing was coming to him but unfinished, vague thoughts of needing to dig lower or move faster for the next receive.

The split second between Oikawa’s hand slamming the serve into motion and Asahi receiving it escaped him; so did the second between Kageyama setting it and Tanaka striking it squarely over the net, out of bounds. He didn’t realize that he had moved himself at all until Asahi was at Tanaka’s side, consoling him, and Hinata was looking to Daichi in concern, the group of them now suddenly right beside the net.

“Don’t worry about it!” Daichi heard his own voice call.

He didn’t remember coming to the net. It was as if he’d appeared there. Maybe they’d just done a synchronized attack, he thought.

His inability to remember sent his swimming disorientation spiraling higher. That was Seijou’s fourth point in a row. The next blow of the whistle saw him settling back into receiving position, only for him to realize that Ukai had called a time-out, as Asahi gestured him over to the others who had already gathered beside the court, a confused look on his face.

He had then found himself sitting on the bench, staring blankly onto the stains of sweat on the emptied court, asking himself what the score could possibly be; the next thing he knew a water bottle was being pressed into his hand and he was drinking from it; in the next moment he was standing up, gathered with the rest of the team, nodding along to Ukai’s firm and encouraging words, processing none of them, but feeling like he should be contributing something; his next awareness was that Sugawara was pulling him away from the others, moving them to the other side of the bench, grabbing onto both of his arms and staring him square in the face.

“It’s okay to be scared, Daichi,” Sugawara had said.

And it had been like being yanked out of the tunnel all at once. Like when he was fiddling with the jack on his busted pair of headphones, and the plug finally hit the right spot in the port and the music suddenly roared to life.

The gym’s lights, which had been streaking across his vision in skinny rockets of white, pulled back into clarity, illuminating the sweat-streaked focus on Sugawara’s face. In the game going on behind them, a ball slammed against the ground and the crowd cheered, and he heard it this time. Sugawara adjusted his grip on his left arm, and with perfect awareness, he felt his co-captain’s fingers pressing into his skin through the warm fabric of his jersey. The knot that had twisted deep in his gut had unraveled itself, he realized, as his hands finally found their way to Sugawara’s forearms and gripped right back. Seijou had scored again, he knew, and now in their second set they stood 21 - 15, but suddenly he had the feeling that they were going to be completely fine.

“You don’t have to be calm and collected for them all the time.” Sugawara was still staring at him, searching his face, the resolve and warmth in his gaze hitting Daichi squarely in the chest. “You can be scared too. The whole rest of the team is on the court with you for that exact reason.” His grip around Daichi’s sweat-slick arms tightened. “You do not have to be infallible.”

Daichi’s vision of Sugawara’s face had begun to blur again, this time out of something other than panic. His stomach tugged deep and hard. He should say something. “Suga—”

“It’s okay to be scared when you’re with us.” 

And Daichi had gone still as he felt his bottom lip begin to tremble; in gratitude, or fear, or shock, he didn’t know. He remained silent for another moment, searching Sugawara’s gaze as he searched back, before nodding. “Okay.”

In the next moment, Sugawara yanked him into a forceful hug, and maybe on a different day or during a different game he would have been embarrassed, but this time his awareness was fixed solely, helplessly, on the feeling of Sugawara’s warmth mingling with his. The words echoed in his head, no longer pitched through a tunnel, spoken, instead, with a near and caring voice.

“It’s okay to be scared when you’re with us.”

Sugawara socked him hard in the stomach the moment the hug broke, and Daichi’s head swam again, not from the force of Sugawara’s swing, or with the thought of how fitting it all was, but with the sound of his knowing laughter.

The whistle blew.

  
  


“It’s okay to be scared when you’re with me,” Sugawara’s whisper came again, offered sheepishly across the darkness of the room, as if pulled directly from the ghost of the memory, this time without the points and numbers swimming around in Daichi’s head, or the flashing sea-green of Seijou’s uniforms on the other side of the court. 

Daichi became aware of his own position, then, and sat upwards to mirror Sugawara without thinking. The room slowly came back into focus, the crackling jazz humming along to the steady lash of the rain, the lychee stalks tapping unsteadily against the frame of the door, the rest of the storm and the fear it had once induced completely forgotten.

“Okay,” Daichi said.

And a few wordless moments of eye contact passed between them before Daichi’s bottom lip was trembling again; in gratitude, or fear, or shock, or something even deeper and warmer; he didn’t need to speak the memory aloud, because Sugawara was suddenly gripping his arms again, the same way that he had that day on the court, and Daichi was gripping right back, and the flash of lightning that lit up the sky behind him illuminated the look of recognition in Sugawara’s eyes, and even though the awareness of the memory was mutual, it was Daichi’s turn, this time, as the floor beneath them shook with the force of the storm, to hug him impossibly close.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning was a fog of heat. The pools of sunlight that gathered on the soft mats of the living room floor, once inviting and warm, were now hot to the touch and blinding to the eye.

Sugawara’s side of the futon was a rumpled, abandoned mess when Daichi rolled over to face it. The very sight of it stirred remembrance in him--of the storm that had swept through the night before, the unspoken memory of the set against Seijou, the drawn-out embrace that had led to entangled sleep. The images came quickly, and pulled low and hard at something nestled deep in Daichi’s gut. He put a hand out to touch Sugawara’s side of the futon, feeling no lingering warmth aside from the room’s ambient heat, and sat up abruptly.

His attention was immediately drawn to the bands of sweat that plastered his t-shirt to his back, and of the vague shape of something colorful sitting on the kitchen counter. Daichi rubbed at his eyes, shoving the sheet that was supposed to have been under him off of his legs as he stood up. 

On the kitchen counter stood a box of raspberry yoghurt popsicles, fresh enough from the store that they hadn’t yet melted, and that the waxed cardboard of the box was still cold and damp with moisture. Beside them lay a note in Sugawara’s near-illegible handwriting:  _ eat quick! melt fast! _

Daichi laughed as he pulled two out of the already-opened box, asking himself how late it was into the morning that Sugawara had already managed to take the truck down to the store and back without Daichi waking. A quick glance inside the small fridge in the corner told him that Sugawara had also stocked up on water and ice cream, among other reasonable foods. He stuck the popsicles in the freezer after sticking Sugawara’s note onto the box, pulling out two water bottles instead.

Daichi crossed the room barefoot, wanting to get a look at what the storm had done to the garden the night before. The first glimpse, once his eyes adjusted to the blinding sunlight, was astounding. The storm had plastered the half-dying plants to the ground. The tall lychee stalks that the rain had initially whipped against the side of the house were fallen over one another, laying defeated beside broad melon leaves that were coated with dirt and in various states of being uprooted. The network of square garden plots, which had already been difficult to recognize beneath the overgrowth, were now impossible to make out. Stands of chicken wire, which had been erected to support tomato vines, were now the only structures left standing among the damage.

At the far side of the garden, where proud rows of still-healthy tea plants stood waving in the heat’s distortion, Daichi noticed movement. Sugawara’s head appeared, clad in a baseball cap, bobbing up and down between rows of plants.

Daichi smiled to himself as he looked over to the garden’s far gate, which led to the driveway, and realized that Suga had pulled up the truck bed-first and had begun loading debris into it, beside wooden cases that Daichi assumed must contain the garden’s meager final harvest.

It wasn’t long until Suga’s head poked up high over the tea plants again, now turned in Daichi’s direction, and Daichi felt almost caught, standing pyjama-clad in the shade of the porch with one popsicle finished and the other freshly unwrapped. Daichi offered a guilty smile, unsure if Suga would be able to make it out.

In well-worn sandals that were clearly too big for him, Suga made his way across the garden with a matching smile, and a hose in tow that caught and snaked around the dampened tangle of overgrowth, and needed to be pulled out from between two bent melon stalks.

“Didn’t take you long to steal the popsicles,” Suga breathed, pausing before the porch steps and looking up at Daichi with one hand on his hip. 

Daichi pulled the second popsicle out of his mouth, eyes lingering on the sheen of sweat gleaming across Sugawara’s forehead, and the small smear of dirt on his cheek that stopped just short of the mole beside his eye, illuminated bright in the sunlight. “No, not at all. Can I ask where they came from?”

Suga smiled. “There’s an old gas station on the corner fifteen minutes away. My grandfather knew the guy who owns it. He always gave me those popsicles for free when I was a kid. Still does. His name’s Tadashi.” He tapped the end of the water hose against his leg absently, and a few drops of water leaked out. “It’s really the only place where you can buy anything around here for miles.”

“I guess I slept in a little too late to come with you,” Daichi said, fighting off a sheepish grin.   


Suga pretended to check a watch on his bare wrist for laughably long moment, squinting as if deep in thought, before looking up at Daichi and pulling a face. “Yeah,” he said. 

Daichi laughed at himself, suddenly feeling even more ridiculous in his boxer shorts and threadbare t-shirt as Sugawara stood there with a hose and gardening gloves. The memory of their embrace last night, which Daichi knew was completely innocent, flashed in his awareness momentarily with the feeling of perverseness that he knew should belong to something else entirely. He nearly stuttered on his next words, hyperaware of Sugawara’s nonchalant gaze lingering on him. “What are you even working on right now? Whatever it is I’m helping once this popsicle is gone.”

Sugawara threw a glance over his shoulder, hose swinging at his side. “I started hacking down the dead stuff and loading it into the truck at first, but I realized that it’s no fun to do that in the heat when I can just make you do it later,” he deadpanned. “So now I’m watering the tea plants in the shade, very slowly and very carefully and taking a very long time. Oh, and I would also like another yoghurt popsicle.” He flashed an innocent smile. “Today’s gonna be a long day for us.”

Daichi, laughing in surprise, took his own half-melted popsicle out of his mouth, offering it out as a joke. “I mean, if you want—”  
“Thanks!” Sugawara said, gardening glove suddenly gone, bare fingers brushing Daichi’s own as he plucked it from Daichi’s grasp and put it in his mouth without a second of hesitation.

And Daichi kept laughing, hearing himself bark out a “ _ Hey! _ ” as Sugawara took off from the porch to dodge his grasp, stumbling forward through the undergrowth with bare feet, aware all the while of the heat curling in his gut that he was certain had nothing to do with the sweltering sun.

+++

The first time that they had discussed it openly was sometime between Tokyo training camp and the inter-highs, in the yawning and conspicuous stillness of their deserted classroom.

The topic had come up before only in passing, and each time, Daichi had felt something within himself shrink back. He could recall the afternoon that Sugawara had come into practice late clutching a rolled-up piece of paper with his center test results on it and Daichi had been unable to broach the subject, or when Sugawara had caught Daichi staring blankly at the future plans form passed out to them in homeroom and kicked him in the shin, or the time that Asahi had insisted that he had been up late cramming for an application deadline when Nishinoya had flung a ball at him for being too slow, and Daichi had noticed a sudden ringing in his ears. 

It was when Sugawara had refused eye contact with him during their counselor’s presentation on application submission, pen tapping steadily against the side of his desk in a show of pretended concentration, that Daichi realized it was maybe for the best that they didn’t talk about it. He had turned his gaze back down to his desk, where a sheet of meaningless due dates from various universities lay, and pressed back as hard as possible on the sinking feeling in his gut.

That was why it had been a surprise, two months later, when Sugawara had appeared during the break between classes to pull himself up beside Daichi onto their classroom’s windowsill and ask plainly, “You’re going to Hokkaido, right?”

Daichi had looked to him in shock and nearly let his bundle of chemistry notes fall to the floor. Blinking at Sugawara’s sun-illuminated and unassuming expression, he had answered without thinking. “Yeah.”

Sugawara had twisted around to stare out the open window, and nodded thoughtfully, while a thousand questions spun through Daichi’s head, only settling down when Sugawara turned to him again with a sheepish smile of acknowledgement. Another moment passed before he spoke, quietly, picking at the unbuttoned collar of his dress shirt. “There’s no point in not talking about it.”

And Daichi had begun to laugh, nodding along, something like relief settling onto his shoulders. “Probably only for two years, if everything goes to plan. I’m probably going to apply to the Miyagi police academy from there.”

“To the community safety division,” Sugawara had finished for him, head still turned out the window, words spoken with a lightness that failed to mask their gravity.

And Daichi had looked to him again, lips parted in surprise. They hadn’t discussed their choices openly, but Daichi had pulled aside one of their teachers the day before to seek advice about the academy, and Sugawara’s awareness meant that he must have been paying attention. His voice came out quiet, when he gathered himself enough to speak. “Yeah, I am. I think that’s the plan.”

“I’m going to Waseda,” Sugawara said soberly. He’d shifted away from the window, then, eyes staring down at his silhouette projected in shadow across the floor. “For eleme—”

“For elementary education studies,” Daichi had cut him off.

It was Sugawara’s turn to look to him then, shock registering on his face for a brief moment before he broke into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “How did you know?”

“I also pay attention.” Daichi had taken another sip of his water and fixed his gaze to their twin shadows spread across the tile, knowing that he was smiling too.

And the two of them had sat there silently in the empty classroom, studying the floor, Sugawara’s legs swinging from the windowsill and the breeze ruffling the collars of their shirts against their necks. Daichi began and ended a hundred unfinished sentences in his head without speaking them aloud.

The only sound that floated up to them was the distant call of students’ voices outside, which suddenly rang haunting and melancholy in his ears. It was the echo of their own voices, when they had been younger and lighter, unconcerned with names or dates or the exact number of kilometers between the northernmost prefecture in Japan and a university tucked away in the south. Daichi began another sentence in his head before deciding not to say it. The breeze kicked up again.

After a few minutes, Daichi passed Sugawara his water bottle wordlessly, and the near-tearful smile he received in return reminded him that, between them, some things could be left unsaid.

+++

“Still doing alright over there, captain?” There was  _ too  _ much amusement in Sugawara’s voice.

“Fine!” Daichi said between heavy breaths. He heaved the short blade another time, letting it beat against the final clump of tangled overgrowth in the plot that stood between him and Sugawara. The dry lychee stalks snapped over in defeat, revealing Sugawara on the other side, who sat squatting among a number of half-packed crates of persimmons and lychee. Around him lay bundles of overgrowth, which he had collected and bound together to dry out in the heat as Daichi razed the sun-baked garden plots flat with his grandfather’s rusted old machete.

Daichi had spun it and bobbed the blade’s weight in his hand as Sugawara had first given it to him earlier in the afternoon, swiping the short, dull edge twice through the air as he was unable to hold back a grin. “You’re giving me this to cut down the garden?”

“Yes, but don’t kill me with it, please,” Sugawara had said, his matching grin belying the glee behind his words as he’d heaved the coiled water hose over his shoulder. “That is a gardening tool, not a weapon,  _ captain _ .”

Daichi had then spun around and mimed a swing at Sugawara’s legs, at which Sugawara reared back in a fit of laughter. “Don’t call me captain!” Daichi had said, but there hadn’t been any force in it.

That had been while the sun had still felt kind and warm against his shoulders, and before it had begun beating down at him with the full force of the afternoon’s heat, plastering his too-thin t-shirt to his torso with sweat and kissing a band of red across his nose. Daichi looked around himself and smiled. In a matter of a few hours he had cut down down all nine square plots of overgrowth into flat defeat, the already drying and half-dead stalks laying collapsed behind him or in half-organized bundles to be taken away in the truck later.

“Drink, please,” Sugawara said, pressing a warm water bottle into his hand without looking. He turned and took in the sight of the decimated garden. They had been working for hours. Daichi watched, vision blurred by sweat and the light bending through the water bottle’s clear plastic, as a smile spread across Sugawara’s face. “You made quick work of cutting it all down.” He made beaming eye contact from under the brim of his baseball cap.

Daichi huffed a breathless laugh, the bottle still pressed to his mouth. “Have I earned some rest?”

Sugawara tugged the machete from his hand where it had been resting at his side and admired the warped, rusted blade’s shine in the sunlight, before setting it down beside him. “Only if you finish off that water bottle.” He flashed another grin, and his eyes lingered at the collar of Daichi’s shirt. “Don’t pass out on me. Eventually I’m going to need you to help me gather all of this up, but you should rest first.”

Daichi joined him at the edge of the garden, where he took shelter in the shade of the truck with the fresh liter of water Sugawara had then pressed into his hands. He watched sluggishly, limbs sweat-slick and sore, as Sugawara sorted through the crates of fruit he’d pulled from the plants that morning. His harvest of ripe lychee, piled haphazardly into three of the bins, was large enough that when Daichi began plucking some away and shelling them into his mouth, all he got was a knowing smile.

“Not exactly the best persimmon the farm has ever seen,” Sugawara mused a few moments later, paring away the green skin of a small persimmon with a knife he’d brought with them outside. He popped a small chunk into his mouth, and after a few seconds of thoughtful silence, offered a piece to Daichi.

“No, definitely not,” Daichi managed in return, making a face at the fruit’s bitterness. “Let me try a good one, though.”

Sugawara peered into the bin that sat between his legs as he shook it. “I’m not sure if we have any good ones.” He picked through the fruit with a smile on his face before pulling a yellow one out and holding it up for Daichi to see. “This might be the most ripe of the bunch.” The breeze kicked up as he held it out for Daichi to take, fluttering the hair that stuck out of his hat against his forehead.

“This one’s better.” The persimmon was less than ripe, but Daichi ate it slowly and without complaining as Sugawara sorted steadily through the bins of fruit that sat around him. The pile of lychee crates were wrangled into order before being moved away and replaced with an assortment of small melons, which were later replaced with long bundles of chopped-down overgrowth as Sugawara slowly moved everything into the bed of the truck as he went. Daichi’s sleepy gaze lingered on his movements.

Sugawara would pass him a piece of whatever it was he was sorting if he deemed it good or interesting enough, and Daichi spent the next hours half dozed-off in the shade of the truck’s back tire, chewing on something Sugawara had given him to eat, and laughing at the never-ending series of anecdotes Sugawara had to offer about the trouble that he and his sisters had gotten into in the garden as kids.

“There’s a hammock near the rope swing by the west side of the peach terraces, do you know what I’m talking about?” Sugawara was crouched over another bundle of overgrown plants that he’d just pulled from the middle of the garden, trying them together with twine and snapping the cord off with his bare hands.

Daichi popped another lychee into his mouth thoughtfully. An image came into his head of its sagging shape, spotted on one of the mornings they had spent here with Asahi as first-years. “I’m pretty sure.”

“When I was nine, Himari and Ichika got me to climb into it,” Sugawara paused for a moment to unroll another band of twine to wrap around the stalks. “And they told me to lay down and hold on.”

“Is it the one hanging between to big maple trees?”

Sugawara glanced at him and nodded, the sunlight catching the beads of sweat across his temples where they slipped down from his bangs. “Yeah. It’s bolted into the trees and hangs from an old rope. So when they made me, I climbed into the hammock and grabbed on, not expecting anything, and Himari wrapped me up in it.”  
“I see where this is going.” A lazy smile spread across Daichi’s face. He popped another lychee into his mouth after cracking open the shell expertly in one hand.

Sugawara nodded, and Daichi could tell he was smiling back even in the shade. “And Ichika grabbed onto one side and Himari onto the other, and after counting down—” Sugawara laughed. “They flipped me around as fast as possible in it.” He gestured in a circular motion in an effort to explain. “Like, spinning me around.”

“I can picture it,” Daichi said, face contorted in amusement.

Sugawara set aside his pile of overgrowth to set a crate between them, and leaned onto it, laughing up at Daichi. “And I was so mad at first, and I was shouting at them to knock it off—”

“Did you fall out?”

Sugawara grinned, and Daichi’s eyes trailed a sun-gleaming drop of sweat that streaked down his neck. “No, I knew to hold on. A part of me knew what they were going to do. That didn’t stop me from getting mad, though, and eventually they just stood back and started laughing while I was still in there.”

“Did you fall out then?”

“No! But I was stuck, facing the ground, and the hammock wouldn’t flip back when they tried to untangle it, and then—” He was cut off again by another fit of laughter, hands clutching the sun-bleached wood of the crate. “Himari started freaking out, because they couldn’t get me out, and she kept saying that our grandad was going to find out what they did, which was fair, and I was freaking out too, at this point--”

Daichi’s gaze flicked from the smears of dirt on Sugawara’s fingertips, to his nose, and to the sunlight gleaming from his smile. “Of course,” came his absent words.  
“--and so they started tugging really hard on the hammock to try and get it to flip over again, and I was shouting at them to stop, because I could feel it coming loose from the tree by my feet, but they weren’t listening, and they kept going until one of the bolts gave up—” Sugawara gestured grandly with both hands, grinning wide and bright. “--and the whole thing fell from the tree on one side and I ended up on the ground with it.”

Daichi laughed with him, less at the story than at the thought that popped into his head. “Wait a minute,” He said, watching Sugawara adjust the hat on his head for the umpteenth time, smile beaming. “The more you talk about your sisters, the more your impulse for misbehavior makes sense.”

Sugawara dropped his jaw in mock indignation, but even as he stared for several moments in silent disbelief--which Daichi could recognize as the realization that he was right--the laughter didn’t leave his eyes. “I’m telling you a story of how my older siblings mistreated me as a child, and that’s the first thing that you say?”

“You know it’s true!” Daichi surprised himself with the teasing in his own voice, knowing there were only a rare handful of times that Sugawara had riled it out of him. “You’re about to prove it to me!”

Sugawara leaned even further forward, searching Daichi’s eyes. “I’ll wrap you up in the hammock and flip you around, too, if you want proof.” Something flashed over his face, then, the bright glee of a realization that Daichi wasn’t fast enough to keep up with. “If I don’t get you with the hose first, lazy-bones!”

And all of a sudden Sugawara was on his feet, vanished from his place beside Daichi in the shade of the truck and nearly tripping over himself to get over his piles of garden trimmings, where Daichi realized the garden hose must lay. 

“Oh no you don’t—” Daichi said. His sore muscles unstuck from the grass as he hoisted himself to his feet, ready to run but realizing too late that Sugawara already had the hose pointed at him, fingers wrapped around the yellow trigger on the spray nozzle and a shimmer of mischief in his eyes.

It was the kind of carefree, childlike behavior that Daichi saw developing between them in moments of solitude. Images came to him, superimposed on the sight of Sugawara threatening him with the hose: a long bus ride back from Tokyo in which Sugawara had balanced his water bottle on Daichi’s head in his sleep, or the times he’d doodled profane images at the margin’s of Daichi’s notes when he wasn’t looking, or stolen a bite of a pork bun when he knew he could get away with it. Each time, Daichi surprised himself at how easily he got caught up in it, and began misbehaving right back.

Daichi ducked out of way just in time for the water to hit the side of the truck, where he had just stood. He whipped around again to see that Sugawara still had it pointed towards him, having just let go of the trigger, eyes wide and mouth hung open. Daichi held out a hand in defense before making a quick dive towards him in an effort to wrest the hose from his hands, hoping that Sugawara wouldn’t be able to react in time.

It all happened too quickly for Daichi to keep track, but somewhere between the cold stream of water spraying him directly in the chest and Sugawara’s laughter filling the air, Daichi managed to wrap his fingers around the hose’s nozzle and turn the water on Sugawara, sending a fountain of water gleaming upwards through the afternoon sunlight before it met Sugawara’s chest.

The fact of just how much stronger he was than Sugawara wasn’t something that he’d ever really thought about, but when he caught Sugawara’s hand against his shoulder and was able to peel it right off, he felt a devilish grin split across his face. It grew only wider when Sugawara met his eyes in shock, and pushed back, only to be overpowered again and driven backward, hose still pointing at him.

It wasn’t long until Sugawara was on the ground with Daichi beside him, their chests heaving with laughter beneath waterlogged t-shirts. Daichi felt Sugawara’s hand tighten in its grip around his arm as Sugawara propped himself up to make eye contact. The hose’s nozzle sat conspicuously in his hand. Sugawara had won it back from him at some point, but the two had collapsed in exhaustion after less than a minute, and now lay inches apart. Daichi’s vision swam with the heat.

“Don’t even think about it,” he managed, smiling.

Sugawara’s grin softened as he set the hose down in the narrow space between their bodies, the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Daichi’s arm lifted up in a mocking gesture of surrender. “You’d get me back, anyways.” There wasn’t a hint of bitterness in his smile, only warmth.

And that was what Daichi appreciated the most, perhaps, about Sugawara’s penchant for mischief--it was always with the understanding that a playful punch to the stomach should never be too hard, or a stolen bite of a pork bun never too big, or that the real purpose of a water fight was to lay beside one another afterwards and dry off in the sun.

Daichi let himself relax into the lawn as he felt Sugawara flip onto his stomach beside him, the hand settled onto his bicep unmoved and his cheek pressed against the grass. They’d worked long enough, Daichi mused, and the defeat in Sugawara’s limbs belied his exhaustion. Daichi, squinting through the sunlight, studied the long-gone baseball cap’s imprint in Sugawara’s hair. He looked to his left and found it lying strewn in the grass, left upturned for the sun.

The kind of comfortable quiet Daichi had gotten to know took hold again eventually. Without fail, the hum of afternoon cicadas and the rustle of the garden clippings swept in to fill the space their laughter had left behind. The truck’s bed loomed over them, its hull glistening where it had been caught by the spray of water. Daichi shifted the muscles in his back and felt himself relax deeper against the earth.

The sun-baked half-sleep returned. Daichi let himself turn his head to the side and study Sugawara, who had long since shut his eyes against the grass. The sun had already kissed a band of pink across his cheeks, and before falling asleep Daichi wondered momentarily if he, too, would be getting a matching burn.


	5. Chapter 5

The sky had cleared suddenly, the second night they had been here as first-years. Daichi could recall the coolness of the grass against his feet and the scrubbed-clean feeling of the air that drafted through the door as he slid it shut, just washed out by evening rain.

It was the sight of Sugawara’s hand, waving him over through the soupy darkness of the night, that roused him from the floor inside. A slightly skinnier hand attached to a slightly skinnier arm, beckoning a slightly skinnier Daichi to slip into the beat-up sneakers he’d worn as a first year, and brave the gap across the lawn to where Sugawara sat swinging in a hammock that hung crooked.

Sugawara hadn’t come inside yet for the evening, as Asahi and Daichi had settled down for sleep minutes before. He had told them he still needed to go around and turn off all of the porch lamps outside. While Asahi had snored off almost immediately, Daichi’s gaze had been fixed through the open screen door, watching the vague shape of Sugawara sitting out alone in the hammock, beside a lamp that hadn’t been turned off. It wasn’t long until an arm reached out in the darkness, flashing in the pinprick of lamplight, waving him over.

“Asahi’s already asleep?” Sugawara asked, letting the ball settle against his fingers. He lay sprawled out in the pocket of the hammock, setting their only volleyball up over his head over and over again, where it brushed against the leaves of the summer-red maples that held the hammock in place.

These were the moments Daichi could recall in which he’d felt he’d really seen Sugawara for the first time. The bare foot swinging absently off of one side of the hammock, the unnoticed strip of skin where his shirt had ridden up on his stomach, the gleam in his eyes that told Daichi he didn’t feel the need to explain his midnight invitation to join him in the slightest. Like these things were obvious, and that the space he was making for Daichi beside him didn’t need to be blinked at before being taken.

So Daichi didn’t blink at it. The hammock creaked beneath his weight, and he smiled at the way their forms slid together. “Yeah, he’s passed out on my futon.”

The first time they’d lined up at the edge of Karasuno’s court and introduced themselves to the team, as first years, Sugawara’s voice had stuttered and shook. Their uniforms had been way too big for him then, hanging off of his shoulders and swinging from his wrists when he ducked for a receive, or reached up to scratch his neck in embarrassment.

And it was Daichi who had spoken first, when the three of them had awkwardly gathered themselves on the gym’s floor for the first time after the upperclassmen had gone. They had sheepishly admitted to one another that the team was not at all what they’d expected. But as soon as that silence was broken, it was Sugawara who had slammed his fist against the court and roused the other two into making a plan of action, voice louder than Daichi had ever heard from him before. Daichi could remember the smiles that had split across their faces.

The deferential respect Sugawara gave to their upperclassmen never slipped, but ever slowly, the barrier that had stood between him and Daichi was pulled down. Even as a first year, Sugawara began pulling teasing faces at Daichi whenever he whiffed a spike, or would chase him around with one of their brooms to get him to move faster during cleanup.

The first time Sugawara had punched him in the stomach was on a late and still evening, long after the rest of the team had gone home, the only sounds left bouncing around the gym the squeak of Asahi’s sneakers against the floor and the tapping of Sugawara’s fingertips against the surface of the ball.

It had been after a fluked set from Sugawara, the ball going far too short, where Daichi had managed to slam the it down on the other side of the net with his left hand anyways.

_You hit that somehow?_ Sugawara had exclaimed, voice echoing across the stillness of the empty court. It was in the next moment, before Daichi knew what was coming, that Sugawara’s fist met his gut. He bent forward, a hand grabbing onto the net, the laughter already pouring out of him.

_Hey!_ He’d heard Asahi call in the distance.

But Daichi didn’t protest. He had been greeted with Sugawara’s beaming grin the moment he looked up, and could only remember feeling that he was beginning to meet Sugawara for real, for the first time.

“He’s a sleepyhead,” Sugawara mused, leaning back hard in the hammock and sending the both of them swinging back and forth.

“I won’t ask why you’re still awake, then,” Daichi studied the small smile that had appeared on Sugawara’s lips, knowing that he wore a matching one.

“I was about to come in. But I guess I won’t ask why _you’re_ awake, either.”

“Mm.” Daichi leaned into the sway of the hammock, watching as best he could through the dim as Sugawara settled the ball back onto his fingers and set it up above their heads again. The gentle rocking motion played with the course of the ball, and Daichi felt the way Sugawara compensated for it, the muscles in his shoulders shifting against Dachi’s own where they were pressed side-by-side.

“What made you become a setter?” Daichi asked, then, eyes drifting from the steady course of Sugawara’s ball to the silver-haloed branches of maple leaves that hovered above them. It was the kind of personal question he wouldn’t have trusted himself to ask Sugawara a month or a season ago, but now came out of him without hesitation.

The rhythmic tapping of the ball continued on, and Sugawara’s gaze didn’t waver. “Hm. I’ve never been asked that.”

“I can take back the question if you want.” There were some things Daichi caught himself saying just because he knew they would make Sugawara snort.

And Sugawara snorted. “I became the setter for my middle school team in my eighth year, but I think I knew that I wanted to become one before then.” Daichi would have sworn he could hear the smile spread across Sugawara’s lips. “When I was a kid, just starting out with my sisters, they made me practice everything, but I was never particularly good at blocking or spiking, and—” He laughed. “Himari and Ichika were both wing spikers. But I was never very strong, or very good at jumping, either. And they were taller than me.”

Daichi had met Sugawara’s eldest sister once, Himari, a silver-haired nursing student with Sugawara’s smile, who had driven them to a practice match once earlier in the year. Daichi remembered avoiding eye contact with her in the rear view mirror as she chatted away softly, hyperaware of the flush that had spread across his face. Her laughter had been the same too, and the aggression with which she’d steered them through downtown Tokyo traffic had reminded Daichi of Sugawara’s punches. They’d gotten out of the car and thanked her, and as an acknowledgment of this she had grinned wide and laid on the horn as she’d driven away. Daichi had nearly jumped out of his skin, but Sugawara just laughed. 

Daichi could imagine her, clad in kneepads with her long hair tied back, squatting in a recieve position to show a smaller Sugawara how to dig correctly, as their other sister looked on. Somewhere up in the peach terraces, in the shade of the trees that surrounded their volleyball court.

“But,” Sugawara continued. The ball went still in his hands, and Daichi looked over to find his smiling gaze fixed on it. “I wanted to stay on the court anyways, even if I wasn’t going to be like my sisters. And it was obvious to me by my eighth year that my only weapon was my sense of the game. I don’t have. . .” He cleared his throat. “I don’t have Asahi’s power or your defensive skill, but I did learn how to watch my opponents. And my teammates. So I started working on my ball control, once I realized that.”

He began setting the ball up again, now pausing each time, resting it in the triangle of his thumbs and index fingers, before sending it back upwards. “I began doing setting drills all the time. I constantly had a ball with me. My goal was to become consistent, not like some kind of genius, just. . . enough to earn a place on the court, so that I could analyse the game. That was my real skill. I’m still not—” his voice cut off as he caught a wayward ball awkwardly in the palms of his hands. He laughed. “I’m still less than perfect, but I'm consistent. It's the only position I can play.”

Daichi shifted his weight in the hammock, suddenly aware of how much deeper it sank on his side. “Mm.”

“And I don’t find it bad, either, only being able to set. Connecting the team, connecting the ball—” He tossed it back up, and when Daichi looked over at him, he wore a cheeky grin. “And, setters get to touch the ball more than anyone else, after all.”

Daichi laughed, short and quiet. “Greedy.”

Sugawara’s shoulder shook in laugher against his. “Maybe a little bit.” He took the ball down after setting it again twice, and rested it against his stomach. “But it’s also the only position I _want_ to play.”

A thoughtful silence swept in before Sugawara rolled the ball onto Daichi’s stomach, inviting him to take it. Daichi wrapped his fingers around the damp surface. “Can I ask how you became a wing spiker?” asked Sugawara, the moment Daichi glanced over at him again.

Daichi laughed. “I don’t think I ever really became one. I just played, and I was never particularly good at setting, or blocking for that matter, so it’s just the position I ended up in.” The rope of the hammock groaned softly as Daichi’s toes brushed the ground, stilling their swaying motion. “But I’m not nearly as powerful a spiker as Asahi, or Tashiro.”

An image came to mind of the first time he had seen their captain slam a clean straight, grazing the outside line of the court with perfect precision. He had felt wonder, followed by a pang of apprehension, as it had dawned on him that he had no idea how one even began to aim like that. Daichi, suddenly aware of just how much taller than him Tashiro was, had smiled weakly as their captain had clapped him on the back, encouraging him before his turn to spike.

“But I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem,” Daichi began again, voice quieter than before. Another image came to him, of the look of amazement on Tashiro’s face as Daichi had dug one of Asahi’s spikes head-on for the first time, the very same practice. “I think I might end up a libero before the end of the year. I would be okay with that.”

Sugawara was conspicuously quiet for a moment, and Daichi found himself following his gaze upwards, to the fragments of night sky revealed by the swaying of the trees’ branches. A pang of doubt came over Daichi before Sugawara finally spoke, voice hushed with apprehension. “You do know they’re never going to let you, right?”

Daichi sat up slowly, sending the hammock rocking backwards before it stilled with the settling of his feet against the ground. The dampness of the grass suddenly felt cold. “What do you mean?”

Sugawara was silent for another moment, and Daichi searched his face as he swirled a dozen questions around in his head. Maybe Tashiro wasn’t actually that pleased with his defensive skills, and Sugawara had noticed something he hadn’t. Sugawara was more observant than him, after all, and perhaps even though the team still lacked a libero, Tashiro saw that his receives weren’t good enough yet to justify disrupting the team’s usual positioning. Maybe this was Sugawara trying to let him down gently, because he had overheard some conversation that Daichi hadn’t. Switching someone’s position in the middle of the year was unusual anyways, and Daichi had always played as a wing spiker, but his defensive--

“Liberos can’t be captains.”

Daichi’s train of thought came to a halt in the stillness that followed. He stared at Sugawara for several seconds before speaking. “What?”

In the darkness, a grin full of amusement and warmth had spread across Sugawara’s face, and Daichi began to get the feeling that he’d missed something. Sugawara kicked the hammock forward again, jostling Daichi out of his sitting position and forcing him to lay back down beside him, hands still lingering on the ball that still sat in his lap. “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Daichi’s gaze returned to the fragments of night sky that still hung over them, feeling a flush of warmth creep along the back of his neck. The two of them swayed in rhythm with the swinging in the hammock, stars kaleidoscoping in and out of sight as the maple leaves eclipsed and retreated from beneath them. Daichi remained wordless, silenced by the feeling of warmth suddenly ringing round and bright in his chest. Sugawara shifted against him, settling the both of them deeper into the hammock, and a twin heat bloomed against Daichi’s skin where Sugawara’s arm met his.

It was Sugawara who spoke again, a smile in his voice, when Daichi hadn’t said anything. “You _do_ know they’re grooming you to become captain, right?”

A grin that Daichi had been holding back finally split across his face. He lifted up the ball above their heads, fingers placed in setting position, before bringing it back down to his stomach without thinking. He rolled it over onto Sugawara, who took it from him with gentle fingers.

“Do you think so?”

Sugawara kicked the hammock back into motion, sending the both of them swinging again, and Daichi glanced over at him; Sugawara was studying him with the same warmth and certainty in his gaze that Daichi was slowly becoming familiar with. He swung his legs, sending the hammock forward. “You’re making me vice captain.”

Daichi’s laughter echoed into the night.

+++

The two had resumed work in the late afternoon, after Sugawara had roused from their unplanned nap on the lawn and shaken Daichi awake. He'd pointed at the red sunburn across his cheeks and laughed. Daichi, after wrestling him back to the ground, had pushed the sleeves of his t-shirt back up over his shoulders and buckled down into the hard work of gathering up all the plants they had chopped down, determined to finish before it got dark.

Sugawara had stood in the truck’s sun-baked bed and reshuffled the bins of the garden’s last harvest, taking whatever heaps of garden clippings Daichi passed to him and doing his best to make them all fit.

“I can bring the clippings down to the compost pile early tomorrow morning,” Sugawara had said, taking the umpteenth bundle of overgrowth from Daichi. He smiled gently at the exhaustion written on his face. He, too, had pushed the sleeves of his t-shirt up over his sweat-slick shoulders, and now stood looking down at him with his hands on his hips. The water bottle sitting on the truck’s roof was tossed in Daichi’s direction. “You should definitely sleep in again tomorrow.” Daichi had given him a look that landed somewhere between gratitude and indignation.

An hour later, with the garden’s plots laying barren behind him and the last bundle of overgrowth sitting in his arms as he made the journey back to the truck, Daichi’s foot caught on the hose that they’d left strewn across the lawn.

“Daichi?”

Daichi caught himself, bent forward, lychee stalks nearly slipping out of his arms.

“I’m fine!” he called, setting himself back upright. He glanced in Sugawara’s direction. “It was just the hose.” Daichi set the bundle of clippings down to begin coiling up the stray hose, but his hands stilled against it.

Beneath the hose, beside the trodden-down patch of grass where they had fallen asleep, a large gray stone was set into the lawn. Where the hose leaked water onto it, it turned an impossibly dark shade of black, streaked with the undersides of Daichi’s shoes.

Daichi hadn’t noticed it before, as they had worked to clear the garden and it had been camouflaged in piles of clippings. He now blinked at its blank surface in wonder. It was perfectly rectangular and flat, large enough for him to spread himself out over it.

Sugawara was beside him without warning, eyes skimming over the rock and resting on the edge, where Daichi’s fingers hovered. “Oh,” Sugawara said, glancing between Daichi and the stone, as if it had only just occurred to him what Daichi was staring at. “This is the painting rock.”

Daichi looked up. “Hm?”

Sugawara smiled. “Or, that’s what I used to call it. You can—” Sugawara sat down on the grass beside him with a thud, grabbing the hose’s leaking nozzle from where it sat between them and clearing the clippings from the far side of the rock. It turned black with moisture where his shoe met the surface. “You can draw on it with water.”

“Is it some kind of. . .” Daichi spread his palm over it, but pulled his hand back suddenly from its burning heat. He smiled sheepishly. “Ouch.”

“It’s hot.” Sugawara grinned. He traced a finger over the edge where it was set into the ground. “My grandfather installed this when I was probably seven or so. I’m not sure why it works, but I think the rock is porous enough that, well—” Sugawara wet his hand on the hose’s nozzle, and drew a streak of black across the rock with a fingertip. The mark almost seemed to sink into its surface. “You can draw on it.”

He wet his finger again, and Daichi watched carefully as Sugawara traced the kanji for his name onto the surface between them. He lifted his hand with a flourish, eyes fixed on the marks he began with, which were now lightening ever gradually. His name seemed to disappear into the rock. “But it evaporates away after a few minutes.”

“Hm,” Daichi murmured. He wet his fingers on the damp skin of his leg before pressing them against the stone, prepared this time for its heat. They left black fingerprints behind, which darkened into the surface before beginning to lighten ever slowly. “I like it.”

He then turned the hose back on for a moment to write the kanji for his own name beside Sugawara’s, the both of them transfixed on his movement. His hand lingered even after he was done with the last stroke. His handwriting was square and neat beside Sugawara’s unruly, round marks.

“Me too. I would sit out here for hours with him,” Sugawara began again, suddenly occupied with a new drawing further up the rock. Daichi knew he was talking about his grandfather without having to ask, eyes searching his thoughtful expression. “And we would draw one big picture over the whole thing, starting from one side and moving over to the other, to see if we could finish it before it started to evaporate.” Sugawara’s index finger traced the outline of a fluffy cloud. “We would always draw the orchard, or a picture of my family, or a bunch of silly animals. When the drawing was gone, we would start a new one.”

Daichi let the silence settle again, watching Sugawara’s pale index finger trace the outline of a chubby bird, which he was drawing sitting in a tree. He lifted his hand, pausing in thought, before beginning another bird beside it. “Or he would teach me new kanji,” Sugawara continued. “I would have to write them down in the spot that they vanished from, once they were gone. My sisters would make me do that, too. It was big enough that we could fit fifty words.” He smiled. “I could never remember them all.”

The breeze returned again, sending stray leaves skittering across the lawn around them and pressing the fabric of Daichi’s shirt to his chest, damp and cool. Sugawara stretched his leg out until it met Daichi’s beside him, and warmth bloomed at the contact. The smile on his lips grew. “But I always liked the pictures the best. The really big ones. We once drew a whole circus, but the one side was gone before we finished the other.”

Daichi’s hands idled where the stone met the lawn, pressing blades of grass into its hot surface. He began speaking without thinking, still staring at the scene appearing in black beneath the careful strokes of Sugawara’s fingertips. “But why spend so much time drawing something, if it’s just going to vanish?”

Sugawara went still, fingertips hovering just barely over the surface of the stone. After a moment of silent consideration, he set his finger back down to finish one of the tree’s branches, and leaned back to take in the sight of his drawing--two birds sat in a tree, with a round sun beaming overhead. He didn’t look at Daichi when he spoke. “That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.”

Daichi’s gaze flicked down to where Sugawara’s name was written next to his, the two sets of kanji about to fade into invisibility, peeled away by the sun.

“Maybe you’re right.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally getting around to posting the stuff for this fic that i've had sitting around. this fic was written months ago, and i write very differently now (i write... atsu... oi? now?) but i still have a soft spot for it and there seem to be a few of you who enjoy it, so take this as my promise that it's inevitably going to be finished. it's 90% of the way, anyways, and i have finished work beyond even this that i haven't posted yet. if you're here, that means you're reading my far more niche work, and i really appreciate that, so thank you!

The keys to the gym had sat heavy in his hand, the night of their final practice, when he knew he’d be using them for the last time.

Hinata and Kageyama had cleared out last, voices echoing around the gym’s yawning ceilings before they ducked out of the open door with cheerful “ _ Good-bye” _ s. Daichi had watched from the doorway, eyes trailing their wavering and shrinking forms until they were swallowed, side-by-side, into the cover of the night, the sound of Hinata’s broken bike chain the only echo trailing their voices. They had been riled up and nearly vibrating with excitement as they’d left, concerned only with the early bus ride that would be taking them to the national tournament the next day, and the glowing, infinite promise of what lay beyond.

Daichi, however, was concerned only with the hollow feeling that their vacancy had left in the gym, and the shooting warmth that Sugawara’s hand sent across his neck as he clapped him on shoulder and said, “We’re taking down the net, remember,  _ captain _ ?”

Daichi had snapped out of it and met Sugawara’s half-smiling gaze, and they’d taken down the net together silently and ceremonially, as they’d earlier asked to do, when Kageyama and Hinata had offered to stay to take care of it for them one last time--Sugawara had looked to Daichi, and back to them, and spoken with his eyes fixed on the ceiling and a small smile on his lips.  _ “Daichi and I can handle taking down the net tonight, I think,” _ he’d said, and Daichi had railed violently against the pricking feeling at the back of his eyes.

It was a ritual they had gone through together a hundred times, as skinny and soft-spoken first years, drilling serves at the vacant gym long after the upperclassmen had gone, and struggling with the net’s poles when they were done; as second-years surviving only on blind faith and the promise of another year coming, no longer having to think as they loosened the net’s supports with practiced hands; as third years, fingers brushing as they met at the center of the folded net, eyes fixed on the floor or on the ceiling lights, never on each other.

It was Sugawara who had broken the silence, when they stood outside in the night’s unforgiving cold and the key had suddenly grown too heavy in Daichi’s hand as he’d reached up to lock the door, so he’d passed it to him.

“I don’t want to go,” Sugawara had said simply, looking between the key and the door that stood before them. The key sat flat, unused, in his palm. Inside, the lights were turned off, and the equipment closet locked and shut.

After several long moments of silence, Daichi finally trusted himself to look him in the face, and Sugawara turned to meet his gaze. “I don’t want to go,” Sugawara repeated, fist curling around the key. He shook his head. “I don’t.”

Daichi had stared back at him, the sound of the cicadas ringing in his ears, and the glare from the gym’s floodlights blurring across his vision. “I know,” he whispered, hand fumbling at his side. 

There was nothing more to be said. Sugawara slid the key into the lock as they both looked on, and when his hand stilled, frozen, unable to turn it shut, Daichi placed his hand over his. Suga’s head was ducked and his eyes fixed to the ground, but Daichi felt his hand relax beneath his. They twisted the lock shut together.

Sugawara later flashed him a wordless smile as they fell into step on the way home, the sight of the gym shrinking into the horizon behind them. The key had been left on its hook in the club room and the lights turned off, for one last time, with unsteady fingers. Daichi grabbed his hand again, and tugged them towards the long way home.

  


+++

  


The peach terraces were lined on either side with broad, sloping fields of yellow grass. Sugawara had pointed them out to him earlier, explaining how they used to mow them down often enough that wildflowers would grow in the spring, and he and his sisters would spend the early days of summer in a rush to collect the blooms before the June sun baked them dry.

The wildgrass had become tall and overgrown since then, their stems bowing to Daichi’s palm as he trailed his hand over the surface of the yellow sea. He was slowly making his way across the bloated belly of the hill to where the grass had been parted into a clearing, of which he could only make out the top.

When he arrived, Sugawara lay haloed in bent-down stalks, a nest of waist-length wildgrass having flattened around him. He had settled down here minutes, hours, an afternoon ago, Daichi didn’t know; peach pits were littered around, and a straw hat drawn over Sugawara’s eyes to shield them as he slept. The sun still swam high above them, bending Daichi’s shadow over the scene.

They had spent the morning plucking down the few remaining rows of good peaches and packing them into crates, which had stood stacked high in the bed of the truck. Daichi had taken the truck down to the farmhouse and unloaded them, and settled on clearing the rest of the plywood away from the shed while he was down there, giving Sugawara some time alone in the orchard.

He had returned, now, without the truck, knowing by some uncertain instinct that Sugawara had disappeared into the lemongrass fields. The walk up was long and sweltering, and his feet ached in his shoes as he stood at the hill’s crest, back to the sun.

Daichi wondered as he studied him if he was staring at the ghost of a younger Sugawara--a skinny boy with dirty shorts and bare feet laying down in these same sun-cracked stalks of grass, which would have swallowed him to his shoulders instead of his waist when he stood up. The image of that child sleeping in this very same spot came easily to him, pale skin kissed pink by the sun, form enveloped by a sea of yellow, the dried sweetness of stolen peaches still tacky on his fingertips. The image didn’t seem at all far removed from the young man he was staring at now, as if by seeing him here Daichi was somehow witnessing some personal glimpse into Sugawara’s childhood. As if in the straw hat pulled over his eyes there lay access to some level of his being that Daichi had never seen before, impossibly far removed from volleyball, or Karasuno, or even Daichi himself.

This, and a hundred other images, were cobbled together into clarity from the fragments of stories that Sugawara had offered to him in the past few days. As they’d worked, he’d recounted images of this very field and this very time of day, the way the angle of the sun would hit the hill just right in the mid-afternoon and how that was the best time to sleep there. He’d told Daichi how the earth would stay cool beneath the peach trees on the neighboring terrace well into the night, and he would bring a flashlight and a book out to read where his grandfather or his sisters would never catch him and make him come inside.

“Wake me,” Sugawara had said, before Daichi pulled the truck away earlier that morning. “If I fall asleep up here, I mean. Wake me up.” He’d wiped the sweat from his forehead before settling his hands on his hips, and Daichi had nodded through the rolled-down car window. He’d caught a glimpse of Sugawara’s smile in the rear-view mirror as he’d pulled away.

Daichi shifted his foot against the earth, feeling stalks of grass crack and resettle beneath his shoe. A large part of him didn’t want to wake him, but rather lay down beside him in the sun, as they had the afternoon before--as if the freedom of the very image of laying in a field would bring him some of the peace that he saw written over every angle of Sugawara’s sleeping posture. He wondered if it had occurred to Sugawara, as he’d settled down, that this might be his last afternoon here, in this spot, under this sun, on this farm, in the space where he had so long stood as a child.

Daichi sat down beside him in an act of indecision, and the stalks of grass beneath him bowed under his weight. They had worked hard that day, and the reminder of that labor was written in the bands of sun along his cheeks and shoulders, and in the deep aching in his thighs. It felt wrong, almost, to wake Sugawara up, even though he’d asked him to. It was as if he was reaching into that imagined part Sugawara’s life--some idea of it--that was not his to touch. It was as if he’d been asked to jostle awake that smaller, silver-haired child, found sleeping in a field years ago, and tell him that it was time to get up and go home.

Perhaps someone had done just that--stirred a younger Sugawara awake in the late afternoon in this very spot, perhaps one of his sisters, or his grandfather. And perhaps Sugawara had risen sleepfully and stood chest-deep in the yellow sea of grass and taken in the sight of the nest he’d left behind, and smiled, because he knew there would be another day and another nap and eventually he would return.

“Suga?” Daichi whispered. He settled his hand over the bare skin of Sugawara’s shoulder, and watched with heat swirling in his stomach as Sugawara’s arms shifted.

“Mm?” Sugawara mumbled. He lifted his hat from his forehead, and met Daichi’s gaze with half-lidded eyes. Confusion registered on his face for a brief moment before his lips twitched into a smile, and then into a grin. Stalks of grass shifted as he sat up, leaned onto one hand, and passed the sun-warm hat to Daichi absently. His grin widened. “You woke me up,” he said, voice hoarse and soft with half-sleep. 

Daichi laughed and pressed the hat to his chest. “Yeah, I did.” His hand had drifted from Sugawara’s shoulder as he’d sat up, and now lingered beside his on the ground. All semblance of guilt melted away at the sight of the smile on Sugawara’s face. “Like you asked.”

Sugawara laid himself back down with a thud, his gaze drifting upwards. A certain awareness hung in the question that came: “I asked you to wake me up?” 

Daichi laughed again, and watched another smile spread across Sugawara’s lips. “Yes.”

“Mmm,” Sugawara hummed in a playful show of uncertainty, sliding his arms up above his head until his hands disappeared into the grass behind them. He stretched, and Daichi’s eyes lingered on his throat, and the thin fabric of his shirt, and the strip of skin that appeared above the waistband of his shorts. An image came to mind of a hammock tucked away behind the farmhouse, and a volleyball rising and falling into the night sky. “Are you sure I did?” Sugawara’s voice cracked with sleep, his eyes now shut again.

There were moments like this, in which Sugawara’s duality showed itself to Daichi. The gentleness in his voice and lack of guard in his posture were the kind of thing that put every wild punch to the gut or overexcited shout he let loose on the court into context. There was a level of sincerity and compassion to be found beneath his mischief, discoverable in the eye contact that followed a snide remark, or the comically earnest request to sleep just a little longer at the crest of a hill.

“Hmm,” Daichi hummed. Heat, pooling with the sun’s light and the bands of sweat on his skin, swelled across the back of Daichi’s neck. “Yes.” He smiled wider.

Sugawara curled in on himself, turning to lay on his side, letting his eyes open again and wander back up to meet Daichi’s. The same image, imagined or real, played in Daichi’s awareness for the hundredth time: a younger, smaller Sugawara, caught half-asleep, pushing against the request to turn in for the evening. Daichi blinked, as if trying to see it more clearly.

“I don’t feel like waking up,” Sugawara said. He reached, clumsily, for the hat that Daichi still had pressed to his chest. His fingers brushed Daichi’s, and he tugged Daichi towards him. “I want to stay longer.”

Daichi lay with him, letting Sugawara’s fingers curl into the hem of his shirt, and watching sleep tug his eyes and his lips back into serenity, gently closed. Eventually he reached across, curling his fingers into the loose fabric of Sugawara’s own shirt until they mirrored themselves perfectly.

Sleep didn’t come. His eyes roamed instead between the waving sea of grass above their heads, and the silence of sleep written across Sugawara’s features, as innocent as a child.

Daichi reazlied, ever slowly, the thought being handed to him by the wanting and steady pressure of Sugawara’s fingertips against his skin, that the image in his head--Sugawara’s private world here, the field, the midday sun, the unspoken invitation to lay beside him--belonged to him a great deal more than he’d imagined.

  


+++

  


The brush of the scissors against the back of his neck had been shocking and cold, but the whisper of Sugawara’s fingertips impossibly warm.

It had been sometime late in their second year, when the spring’s rains had long washed in, the sky opening itself up into downpour and the wildflower blooms emerging in eager response. The earth outside the gym was soggy and only just beginning to warm, and the soles of the shoes they’d left in Sugawara’s foyer moments ago were caked brown at the bottom with mud.

Daichi wasn’t certain on what exact day, week, or month it had been, but he could recall with clarity that it was long past the point in time where he’d once hesitated to call Sugawara his best friend. It was also long past the point where Daichi would have hesitated at the invitation to stop by his house after practice, or blinked at the suggestion that he let Sugawara cut his hair. They had dropped their bags in the corner and waved hello at Sugawara’s mom before stumbling upstairs, Daichi knowing the way to the bathroom and the skinny metal shears in the medicine cabinet without needing to ask.

There had already been a growing handful of times that Daichi had found himself at Sugawara’s late in the evening. They ended up more often than not encircled by sheets of schoolwork on Sugawara’s bed, the two of them leaning back-to-back and Sugawara speaking with warm, amused patience about the subjects that Daichi struggled with, but he always seemed to get. There had also been a time in which Daichi would have flushed at a third explanation of a chemical equation he couldn’t understand, but recently he’d caught himself asking for them, even when the formulas already made sense.

“It’s getting a bit long anyways, you’re right,” Daichi had said earlier that night, when Sugawara had tugged at the locks that brushed past his earlobes. They had stood under the floodlights outside the convenience store, a liter bottle of an electrolyte drink being shared between them long after the rest of the team had gone. Daichi had stilled against the sudden and shockingly warm touch of Sugawara’s fingers in his hair. “You can do it,” he had managed to get out. They had grinned in unison.

Sugawara had laid a towel over his shoulders and set him down on the lip of the bathtub. Daichi had sat there in silence for several long moments, watching the scissors glinting in Sugawara’s left hand, and not letting himself shut his eyes against the gentle pressure of his fingers carding through his hair. Sugawara began unceremoniously, with a snip at the back of his neck and a stifled bout of laughter that nearly made Daichi whip around.

“I’m not going to look like Tanaka, am I?” Daichi demanded. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Sugawara said, stilling a hand against the back of Daichi’s head. His thumb stroked soothingly over the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. “Don’t worry, I didn’t mess up. I’ve done this plenty of times.”

Daichi wore a wry smile, eyes fixed on the bathroom door. “Oh yeah?”

Sugawara began snipping away steadily at the back of Daichi’s head. “I cut my teammates’ hair sometimes in middle school.”  
Daichi blinked in surprise before splitting into a grin. “I wouldn’t have let you cut my hair in middle school.”

Sugawara snorted. “It started when one of our middle blockers stuck a piece of gum into a seventh-year’s hair in the locker room.” He tapped his fingers against Daichi’s shoulders thoughtfully. ”It got so tangled that the only option was to cut it out.”

“Oh,” Daichi said.

”They didn’t want our coach to find out, though, and the seventh-year wouldn’t let the middle blocker near him with scissors, so they asked me to do it.” The smile in his voice was clear enough that Daichi could picture it on his lips. “All we had were the utility scissors we found in the back, but I did a good job, apparently.” He paused a moment to brush stray hairs from the back of Daichi’s neck. “But our coach found out anyways, because a haircut right before practice gets noticed.”

Daichi felt his smile widen, and the twinge of nervousness in his gut weaken. “So after that you just cut it for them all the time?”

Sugawara shrugged, and his hands fell to rest on Daichi’s shoulders once more. “When they asked, at least.” He had come around, and was now bent forward slightly to study Daichi’s hair from the front. Daichi was presented with the open expanse of his collarbones, where the too-wide neck of his t-shirt dipped forwards. Sugawara’s scissors hovered over the top of his head, held in steady hands. “Hold still.”

Daichi hadn’t realized that his leg was bouncing until he stilled it.

Minutes later, when Sugawara announced that he was was done, Daichi stood up to look at himself in the bathroom mirror. The haircut was even and clean, and felt normal to him when he ran his hands through it, until his fingers stopped at the back of his head, where the hair was left longer than usual.

“You left it longer in the back,” Daichi murmured.

Sugawara appeared in the mirror behind him, avoiding his gaze to push his fingers aside. He began to wipe a washcloth over the back of his neck, damp with warm water. “I like it that way,” he said. 

“Oh.”

Sugawara blinked at the back of Daichi’s head for a silent moment, hands gone still, before going on. “Don’t move. I gotta get the bits of hair off, or it’ll be itchy.”

Daichi searched Sugawara’s face in the mirror, and caught the trace of a repressed smile.

He stayed over late into the evening, the two of them huddled onto Sugawara’s bed with their homework spread out between them. Sugawara split his time between tapping his pen against the wall and jostling Daichi’s leg with his bare foot, only stilling when Daichi asked him to check the answer to one of his math problems. He would go silent, pen pressed to his lips, and scan the problem repeatedly before scrawling a big smiley face onto it and passing it back to Daichi if it was correct.

_ You should be a teacher, _ Daichi thought. He didn’t trust himself to say it.

Whatever Sugawara was writing on turned from his biology notes to something else entirely, scrawled on a piece of loose paper, conspicuously angled away from Daichi’s vision. Daichi got three math problems deeper, a smiley face on each of them, before he jostled Sugawara’s leg back and asked:

“What are you writing?”

Sugawara looked up, smiled, and returned his eyes to his work. “Nothing.”

The knowing in his smile lingered, an invitation to continue prodding. Daichi leaned forward over his own pile of chemistry worksheets to try and get a look. The futon dipped between them where he put his hand down. “What is it?”

Sugawara only pulled his knees in closer, his eyes wide and innocent. His pen tapped against his knee. His question was pointed, and full of mock surprise. “What do you mean?”

Daichi grimaced, reaching out with a quick hand to snatch the paper from Sugawara, who let him take it. Daichi didn’t miss the grin on his face.

“Hand signals,” Sugawara said quietly, as Daichi scanned the paper. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while now.”

Sugawara had covered the ripped-out piece of notebook paper with crooked little volleyball courts in various stages of completion, all the way into the corners. Circles, labeled with MB, S, and WS represented the players, lines and arrows connecting them haphazardly. Numbers and hastily scrawled kanji stood beneath some of the drawings, alongside drawings of hands in various positions.

Daichi met Sugawara’s gaze, and was surprised to find guard in his posture, his arms pulled around his knees and the playful smile gone from his lips. 

“These are your. . .” Daichi’s brows knitted together, and he formed his right hand into one of the drawn signals. “This corresponds to a particular play?”

Sugawara matched the signal Daichi had made with his own hand. “That’s for a wide toss to the left.” He cycled through several other hand positions, rattling off names. “That’s for a toss to the center court, that’s for a wide toss to the right, that’s for a stationary set, that’s for a—” he stopped for a moment, frowning, before snatching the paper back from Daichi and flipping it to face him.

“Forgot it?” Daichi prodded.

Sugawara grinned sheepishly, switching his hand into a new position. “That’s for a dump.”

“Mm,” Daichi said, taking the paper when Sugawara handed it back to him. He traced a finger over the torn edge, smiling at the places where Sugawara had erased and re-drawn a hand several times to get the fingers right. That was something Daichi had learned about him recently, after being passed a page of chemistry notes lined with detailed doodles of birds and cats--Sugawara could draw quite well. The drawing of the hand matched the proportions of his own exactly when he held it up in comparison.

Daichi looked up to find Sugawara cycling through the hand positions again, this time with comical focus, and his smile split into a grin. The feeling of wonder swirling in his stomach bubbled over. “Did you come up with these on your own?

Sugawara laughed. “No, not at all. I’m definitely not the first setter to ever use hand signals, it’s something I’ve seen in tournaments before.”

“No, I know, I mean. . .” Daichi flipped his hand back and forth between two of the positions, one with three fingers out and one with only the index and thumb finger extended. “I mean the signals themselves, the way they correspond to the plays.”

“Oh,” Sugawara said. He stuck his hands behind his head and leaned back, another sheepish smile spreading across his face. “Well, yeah, I made them up randomly. If they were the same as the standard ones, I figured the opposing teams might catch on.”

Daichi laughed, setting the paper down onto the stack of homework that sat between them. He felt himself flush as he studied it. “I didn’t even know standard ones existed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sugawara pulled a face at him, jostling his leg. The mood changed suddenly, and Daichi watched with relief as the guard in Sugawara’s posture dropped. “What sport have you been playing this whole time? Date Tech’s third-year setter used them when he got switched in during the second set of our match last year in the first round of preliminaries. Were you even watching?”

Daichi laughed harder, glad Sugawara was throwing verbal punches again, but knowing he had to deliver a blow back. He picked up the sheet of hand signals. “Is this you making a grab for my position as captain next year, then, if you pay such good attention?”

Sugawara’s face split into a grin. “Oh, so  _ now _ you admit they’re making you captain?” He reached out to take the paper from him, but Daichi caught his wrist with his other hand. The two both stared at the point of contact before meeting eyes.

Sugawara ducked forward first to try and tackle Daichi onto the bed, sending math worksheets and the paper in his hand flying. Daichi held him still, bracing against the grip he had on his wrist, until he leaned forward and reversed their movement to send Sugawara onto his back. Homework crumpled beneath his knees and laughter escaped from the both of them, rising with the tightness of Daichi’s fingers around Sugawara’s arms, and deepening with the futon dipping beneath their shared weight. Daichi hovered over him as Sugawara went limp in defeat, both arms pinned to the pillow above his head. He searched Sugawara’s face, and the wicked grin that wasn’t fading, even as the quiet swept in. 

“You’re getting captain no matter what,” Sugawara said. The gleam in his eyes betrayed whatever jealousy he was trying to inject into his words. Daichi’s gaze broke from his and wandered down to his chest, which rose and fell with heavy breath. “And I’m never forgiving you for it either.”

Daichi suddenly rolled onto his back and swung Sugawara around with him with all his strength, settling himself onto the futon and letting go of his wrists so that Sugawara hovered over him instead. His eyes trailed the wide-open collar of his shirt, which swung as Sugawara steadied himself over him.

“Even when I make you vice captain?” Daichi asked.

Sugawara stifled a bout of laughter. Daichi watched him study his face, eyes lingering where his ear and jaw met, until Sugawara brought his fingers up to brush the stray locks of hair he’d been careful not to trim too short. A rare flush spread across his face.

“Maybe then.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading! my name's june and i'm @summersugawara on twitter!


End file.
